Welcome! My name is Andy Li, a third-year PhD student (= fifth in the U.S. system) in Finance at the University of Amsterdam and a visiting researcher at the Dutch Central Bank. I am currently a visiting student at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Hellmann
Upcoming Events: SFS Cavalcade 2025, NBER SI Entrepreneurship, NBER Boot Camp, Oxford PERC, Private Market Research Consortium Lausanne, Entrepreneurial Finance PhD Summer Workshop, GRASFI 2025.
Research Interests
Entrepreneurial Finance; Financial Intermediation; Public Finance
A central motivation of my work is that successful entrepreneurial ecosystems often benefit from government support. While theory and empirical evidence highlight the positive roles governments can potentially play, not all interventions are effective. I study how their impact depends on design, governance, and organizational factors.
Research
Do Development Financial Institutions Create Impact through Venture Capital Investments?
Working paper, joint with Aleksander Andonov and Paul Smeets
Presentation: SFS Cavalcade NA 2025; NBER SI Entrepreneurship; WEFI webinar; Oxford PERC; Private Market Research Conference 2025 (Lausanne); 1st Amsterdam Sustainable Finance Conference; GRASFI Annual Conference 2025 (Paris), LTI@UniTO Bank of Italy Workshop on Long-term Investors, IFC Private Sector Development Research Network Seminar.
Despite being among the largest institutional investors globally, Development Financial Institutions’ (DFIs) invest- ment activities remain understudied. We document DFIs’ substantial growth in venture capital (VC) investments, where they participate as limited partners in one in six deals and aim to address market failures, such as externalities and information frictions. We identify four objectives DFIs pursue through VC investments: building VC ecosystems, supporting entrepreneurship, fostering innovation, and promoting sustainability. We test whether DFIs meet these objectives and our findings vary between developed and developing economies. In developing economies, DFIs demonstrate greater mandate alignment by targeting industries with positive externalities, providing capital to underrepresented fund managers, and improving performance transparency, though they invest less in young funds and early-stage deals than conventional VCs. Firms backed by DFIs achieve similar outcomes to those backed by conventional VCs in terms of profitability, employment, patenting, and sustainability, but attract fewer follow-on investments from private capital. In developed economies, which account for most DFI VC investments, we find limited evidence that DFIs address market failures and their impact is more muted. Organizational structure and investment approach explain why DFIs generally fall short of their stated mandates. Bank-affiliated and subnational DFIs underperform, while direct investments appear more effective at realizing developmental objectives.
Government Loan Guarantees for Startups
Work in progress, single-authored
I document the growing use of government loan guarantees to support innovative startups. Using confidential credit-registry data matched to venture capital (VC) records, I show that one in eight VC-backed startups receives a guarantee in the euro area. Yet, little is known about how these guarantees operate and whether they are effective in financing startups. A model suggests that guarantees are effective if they reach startups that are both promising and credit-constrained. Empirically, guaranteed loans require much less collateral, carry lower interest rates, and go to moderately riskier borrowers than comparable unprotected loans. However, guarantees disproportionately flow to startups backed by top-tier VCs that already enjoy easier credit access absent guarantees. These recipients do not exhibit lower credit risk and tend to be the weaker firms within top-tier VC portfolios. To probe mechanisms, I exploit the COVID-19 expansion of guarantees and find that startups backed by top-tier VCs benefit more from relationship lending and program know-how. Overall, startup guarantees ease credit access without incurring excessive risk, but current allocations tilt toward resourceful startups that are not necessarily more promising. I provide several suggestions on program design to improve efficiency.
Environmental Protests against Banks
Work in progress, joint with Annick van Ool (Dutch Central Bank)
Research Grant: A Sustainable Future 2024 Fall
We document a global surge in protests against banks over environmental issues (n = 478). This paper examines the impact of these protests on banks along three dimensions. First, in the short run, we find no significant effect on banks’ stock prices. Second, we study medium-run responses in banks’ environmental communication and show that, following protests, banks increase the frequency of environment-related terms in their annual reports. Finally, we analyze long-term effects on banks’ lending practices using confidential loan-level data covering all banks operating in the euro area. We find no significant change in lending behavior following protests. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of protests targeting financial institutions. Overall, the real effects of civil disobedience on banks appear limited.
Determinants of spreads on European supranational debt: towards a European safe asset?
Work in progress, joint with Roel Beetsma (University of Amsterdam) and Kalin Anev Janse (European Stability Mechanism)
Presentation: European Economic Policy RPN Annual Meeting 2025
Education
Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Visiting Student, fall 2025
Hosted by Prof. Thomas Hellmann
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
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Fundamental Finance
First-year bachelor course, basic corporate finace and asset pricing
U. Amsterdam
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Corporate Finance
Second-year bachelor course for Economics and Business Economics
U. Amsterdam
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Multivariate Calculus
First-year bachelor course for Econometrics ans Operations Research
U. Groningen
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Prof. Aleksander Andonov
Supervisor, Chair
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Prof. Enrico Perotti
Supervisor
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Prof. Paul Smeets
Supervisor