Welcome! My name is Andy Li, first-year PhD student in Finance at

University of Amsterdam and visiting researcher at the Dutch Central Bank.

Research Interests

  • Primary Field: Private Assets and Financial Intermediaries

My research focuses on the intersection of private assets and financial intermediaries. What roles do financial intermediaries play in the rapid growth of private assets over the last two decades? How does the rise of private markets influence financial intermediaries’ asset and liability management, as well as their product offerings?

  • Secondary Field: Sustainable and Impact Investing

- Growing environmental activism spreads quickly to the financial sector. Do social preferences drive tangible changes in firms through financial intermediaries?

- How can the impact of private market investment be measured and do institutions with impact mandates deliver?

  • I enjoy applying granular (administrative, confidential, and hand-collected) data to answer aggregate questions, and combining empirical findings with theories.

Research

The Impact of Development Financial Institutions in Private Markets

Work in progress, joint with Aleksander Andonov and Paul Smeets

Development Financial Institutions (DFIs) play important roles in promoting economic growth with 23 trillion dollars AUM, yet little is known about their investment activities and actual impact. We introduce a novel dataset to study nearly all DFIs’ investments over 30 years in private markets, where DFIs participate in 1 out of every 10 deals. We propose a list of conceptual indicators to check whether DFIs create impact such as ‘early investor’, ‘capital crowd-in’, and ‘concessionality’. We find that DFI-backed funds a) do not earn lower returns, contrast to private impact investors studied in the literature, b) are not more financially transparent, c) invest in later-stage projects, d) are less likely to be of new series or new GPs, e) have fewer follow-up investments, and f) are not more likely to invest in high-tech or high-externality industries. Compared to firms invested by traditional investors, DFI-backed firms experience similar growth patterns, have better environmental management, and are involved in fewer scandals. Overall, we raise doubt on DFIs’ impact and provide suggestions to generate impact through private market investment.

Environmental Protests against Banks

Work in progress, joint with Annick van Ool (Dutch Central Bank)

We document a global surge (n = 478) in protests against banks for environmental causes. These protests increasingly express both climate and biodiversity concerns. This paper aims to study their impacts on banks along three dimensions. First, we analyze the short-run effects on banks’ stock prices through an event study and regression analysis. Second, we investigate the medium-run effects on banks’ environmental policy by training state-of-the-art language models suitable for the analysis of biodiversity and climate issues. Third, we explore the long-term impacts on banks’ lending practices using confidential loan-level data for all banks operating in the Euro Area. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of protests targeting financial institutions. Studying a large number of targeted protests enables us to assess their impacts at a granular level. Overall, we highlight the interconnectedness between climate and biodiversity issues and the real effects of civil disobedience on banks.

Education

Tinbergen Institute, University of Amsterdam

  • Mphil. Economics, 2021-2023

  • Track: Advanced Econometrics and Finance

  • GPA: 1/26

University of Groningen

  • Bsc. Econometrics and Operations Research, 2018-2021

  • Minor in Math

  • GPA: 2/147

Research Experience

Dutch Central Bank

  • Visiting researcher, 2023 -

Erasmus University Rotterdam

  • Research assistant in financial econometrics, Feb - Aug 2023

University of Amsterdam

  • Research assistant in macrofinance, Feb - June 2023

University of Groningen

  • Research assistant in econometrics, July - August 2022

Teaching Experience

  • Fundamental Finance

    First-year bachelor course, basic corporate finace and asset pricing

    U. Amsterdam

  • Corporate Finance

    Second-year bachelor course for Economics and Business Economics

    U. Amsterdam

  • Multivariate Calculus

    First-year bachelor course for Econometrics ans Operations Research

    U. Groningen

  • Actuarial Science

    Two second-year bachelor courses, covering insurance and risk management.

    U. Groningen

Thesis Supervision

I am actively looking to supervise ambitious bachelor and master students interested in research and/or learning more about one of the listed topics.

I have supervised 9 bachelor students and they all claim to have learnt a lot (hopefully not just out of politeness!). And I enjoyed it a lot as well! Please don’t hesitate to contact me for a coffee or online call if you are interested.

  • Suggested reading:

    Hall, B. H., & Lerner, J. (2010). The financing of R&D and innovation. InHandbook of the Economics of Innovation.

    Acs, Z., Åstebro, T., Audretsch, D., & Robinson, D. T. (2016). Public policy to promote entrepreneurship: a call to arms. Small Business Economics.

    Gompers, P. A., Gornall, W., Kaplan, S. N., & Strebulaev, I. A. (2020). How do venture capitalists make decisions? Journal of Financial Economics

    Cunningham, C., Ederer, F., & Ma, S. (2021). Killer acquisitions. Journal of Political Economy

    Ewens, M., Nanda, R., & Rhodes-Kropf, M. (2018). Cost of experimentation and the evolution of venture capital. Journal of Financial Economics

    Botelho, T. L., Fehder, D., & Hochberg, Y. (2021). Innovation-driven entrepreneurship. National Bureau of Economic Research.

  • Brad M. Barber, Adair Morse, and Ayako Yasuda (2021). Impact investing. Journal of Financial Economics

    Shawn Cole, Leslie Jeng, Josh Lerner, Natalia Rigol, and Benjamin N. Roth (2023). What do impact investors do differently? National Bureau of Economic Research.

    Jeffers, J., Lyu, T., & Posenau, K. (2023). The risk and return of impact investing funds. SSRN Electronic Journal.

    Ye Zhang (2021). Impact investing and venture capital industry: Experimental evidence. SSRN Electronic Journal.

  • Suggested reading:

    Hellmann, T., & Puri, M. (2002). Venture capital and the professionalization of start‐up firms: Empirical evidence. The Journal of Finance

    Kaplan, S. N., & Schoar, A. (2005). Private equity performance: Returns, persistence, and capital flows. The Journal of Finance

    Kaplan, S. N., & Strömberg, P. (2009). Leveraged buyouts and private equity. Journal of Economic Perspectives

    Davis, S. J., Haltiwanger, J., Handley, K., Jarmin, R., Lerner, J., & Miranda, J (2014). Private equity, jobs, and productivity. American Economic Review

    Bernstein, S., Giroud, X., & Townsend, R. R. (2016). The impact of venture capital monitoring. The Journal of Finance

Supervisors

  • Prof. Aleksander Andonov

    Supervisor, Chair

    Link

  • Prof. Enrico Perotti

    Supervisor

    Link

  • Prof. Paul Smeets

    Supervisor

    Link