Centre staff/researchers
Chendi Zhang
Centre Director and Professor of Finance
Chendi is Professor of Finance and the Director of Exeter Sustainable Finance Centre. He is Associate Dean for Research & Impact at the University of Exeter Business School. He specialises in sustainable and responsible finance, corporate finance, behavioural finance, and emerging markets. Previously he has been a faculty member of Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, for twelve years.
Ian Bateman
Professor of Environmental Economics
Professor Ian Bateman is an environmental economist with a wide array of research interests. These revolve around the issue of ensuring sustainable wellbeing through the integration of natural and social science knowledge within decision making and policy. Particular interests lie in the fields of quantitative analysis, integrated modelling and the valuation of non-market benefits and costs. Ian is Co-Director of the Land, Environment, Economics and Policy Institute (LEEP). Ian is a Member of the UK Natural Capital Committee (NCC) and also a Member of the Board of Directors of the UK Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC).
Jason Cen
Lecturer in Finance
Jason’s research interests are international asset pricing, portfolio theory, and sustainable investing. Specifically, one of his recent research projects examines how the incorporation of ESG ratings impacts mutual fund performance. Jason’s work has been published in academic journals such as the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis and the Journal of Empirical Finance. In addition, his work has also won several awards and research grants such as the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, the Best Paper Award for Asset Pricing and Investments at the FMA European Conference, and the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance (CERF) Research Grants. Jason holds a PhD in Finance from Bayes Business School (formerly Cass) and a MSc in Finance and Economics from LSE.
Konstantinos, Chalvatzis
Professor, Associate Pro-Vice Chancellor for Business Engagement and Innovation
Professor Konstantinos Chalvatzis is experienced in ESG disclosure assurance with technical expertise in environmental claims. Moreover, his funded projects have explored the structure and impact of early-stage financing and advising of sustainability innovations via angel and digital platforms. He is particularly interested in the industry and regulation-led evolving sustainability reporting landscape and its potential for sector-wide emission cuts.
Linquan Chen
Lecturer in Finance
Linquan’s research interests are in the areas of empirical asset pricing, especially short selling and securities borrowing and lending. Her work in sustainable finance mainly focuses on how firm-level ESG news affect stock market outcomes. Specifically, she investigates how short sellers and mutual fund managers respond to firm-level ESG news. Linquan holds a PhD in Finance from the University of Warwick.
Yao Chen
Lecturer in Finance
Yao’s research on sustainable finance focuses on how ESG sentiment affects share prices and mutual fund decisions. His work has been presented at leading conferences in sustainable finance such as the Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance (GRASF) conference. His green finance project received funding support from the British Academy. Yao also serves as an ad-hoc referee of sustainable finance-related papers. He holds a PhD from the University of Warwick.
Angela Christidis
Associate Professor of Finance
Angela is a Deputy Head of Finance and Accounting Department. Angela obtained her PhD in Finance at the University of Exeter Business School and had several years of experience working in leading multinational firms as a corporate financial analyst and finance manager before returning to academia. Angela lectures on banking and financial services at postgraduate level and her current interests include climate finance, ethical investing, responsible finance, corporate sustainability and embedding sustainability into teaching, learning and curriculum. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Certified Management and Business Educator, a Member of the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment and a Member of the Society for Research into Higher Education.
Lora Dimitrova
Senior Lecturer in Finance
Lora’s research interests are entrepreneurial finance, innovation, venture capital, FinTech and climate finance. In particular, she is exploring the idea of how innovative start-ups can lead the battle against climate change, and how investors can be incentivised to invest in green companies. Her work has won several research grants and awards including the Chaire Fintech AMF Grant, the British Academy Leverhulme Research Grant, and the Coller Institute of Private Equity Runner-up Prize. Lora earned her PhD from the London Business School.
Jing-Lin Duanmu
Associate Professor in International Business
Jing-Lin is Associate Professor of International Business and the Director of Research & Impact for the Department of Management in Exeter Business School. Her research interests include international conflicts and trade relations, geo-political risk and multinational corporation strategy, and corporate social responsibility, including environmental issues and equality. Her work has been published in Strategic Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, and Journal of World Business, etc.
Yang Gao
Lecturer in Finance
Yang's research interests are in empirical corporate finance and interplay with Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG). His current research project focuses on end-consumers' responses to corporate conduct and examines whether end-consumers' attitudes can shape corporate practices and policies. He is also interested in determinants of within-firm pay inequality and labour retention.
Ben Groom
Dragon Capital Chair of Biodiversity Economics
Professor Ben Groom is the Dragon Capital Chair of Biodiversity Economics at the Department of Economics at Exeter University. He is an environmental and resource economist working on the economics of biodiversity, ecosystem services and intergenerational fairness. His current interests are in how the financial sector can be augmented to take into account the impact on biodiversity. He is an observer on the Task Force for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and a founding member of the Treasury Green Book Biodiversity Working Group. He is a visiting professor at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.
Vicky Kiosse
Associate Professor of Accounting
Vicky’s research interests focus on capital markets-based research including pensions, non-GAAP reporting and corporate social responsibility. In the context of her research on corporate social responsibility, Vicky was involved in the Prince’s Accounting for Sustainability project and has conducted a study of Aviva’s deployment of the Connected Reporting Framework. This research was funded by the Accounting for Sustainability Project and a number of professional accountancy bodies.
Fangyuan Kou
Lecturer in Finance
Fangyuan’s research interests are empirical corporate finance, banking, and climate finance. She is currently exploring the green credibility of firms and how it impacts corporate debt structure
Chenyan Lyu
Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Sustainable Investment
Dr. Chenyan Lyu has joined the University of Exeter Business School as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Sustainable Finance in March 2023. Chenyan has expertise in sustainable finance, energy economics, financial economics, and macroeconomics. Her research mainly focuses on the carbon financial market as the carbon market is believed to be one of the most important policy instruments to meet global net-zero CO2 emissions target. The carbon market derivates are often used by industry companies as core assets when seeking investments that meets the ESG standards. Her research included in-depth, quantitative studies of the carbon derivatives market, green bond market, and the energy markets.
David Monciardini
Senior Lecturer in Management
David Monciardini is a social scientist with a strong interdisciplinary background, which spreads across Accounting, Law and Sociology. David research interest revolves around the relationship between business and society and its regulation through legal and social norms. This includes research on circular economy and its regulation; business and human rights; sustainable finance; and social and environmental business accountability. David has published in several international academic journals including Business Ethics Quarterly; Business & Society; Business Strategy & the Environment; Journal of Business Ethics; and Regulation & Governance.
Enrico Onali
Professor of Finance
Enrico is the Head of the Finance and Accounting Department at the University of Exeter Business School. His research interests lie mainly in the areas of corporate governance, banking, and corporate finance. His work has been published in leading academic journals such as the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, the Journal of Financial Intermediation, and the Journal of Corporate Finance. Enrico serves as an Associate Editor for The British Accounting Review and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK).
Jane Shen
Senior Lecturer in Finance
Jane’s research interests are in the areas of risk management, ethical investing, optimal hedging, sustainable finance and applied financial econometrics. Jane is the programme director for the MSc Finance and Investment and the MSc Financial Analysis and Fund Management. She is particularly interested in establishing and promoting industry-led applied projects for our MSc students in the areas of ESG and sustainable finance. Jane is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Chartered Member of the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment. In addition to her academic work, Jane has also worked as a consultant with several leading investment banks and brokerages in the area of currency valuation, asset allocation and trading cost analysis.
Monika Tarsalewska
Senior Lecturer in Finance
Monika conducts research in the areas of corporate finance and private equity with a particular focus on stakeholders. Her research on executive compensation and employee wellbeing was covered by Bloomberg: Stakeholders Get a Committee. She is also interested in sustainable investment strategies with positive impact. Graduate of Lancaster University, PhD.
Grzegorz Trojanowski
Professor of Finance
Grzegorz’s interests focus on the areas of corporate governance, corporate finance, ESG and corporate social responsibility, corporate reporting, and top management teams. Specifically, his recent research examines the determinants and effects of ESG performance and disclosures. Grzegorz also studies interdependencies between financial and non-financial (ESG) outcomes as well as effects of managerial characteristics on companies’ environmental innovation. His work has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, and British Journal of Management and has also informed the Future of Corporate Reporting project by the Financial Reporting Council.
Justin Tumlinson
Associate Professor in Business Analytics
Justin (PhD, UC-Berkeley) is the Director of the Research Method Centre. He studies incentives to behave pro-socially, especially environmentally, by building formal models of firm and individual behavior using the tools of game theory and operations research, and then testing their predictions econometrically using large-scale observational data. He publishes his results in management and economics outlets like Management Science, Strategic Management Journal and the Journal of Economic Theory.
Claire Vis-Bulmer
Sustainable Finance Sector Lead, IIB
Claire is the Innovation sector lead on Sustainable Finance & Impact Investing and also supports the departments of Finance, Accounting and Economics at the University of Exeter Business School. Her focus is on developing new and ongoing strategic relationships between external organisations (specifically those in the financial services sector) and academics. This includes raising the profile of commercially funded research through various mechanisms such as contract research, consultancy and Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) and executive education programmes designed to address the issues of those working in financial services.
Claire has over twenty years’ experience working across a range of different sectors including asset management, professional services, wealth management and the pension consultancy sector. During her career she has developed skills in strategic planning, project management, campaign and database management.
Wei Xin
Lecturer in Finance
Wei’s research interests are sustainable finance (majoring in climate and biodiversity), empirical asset pricing, and Environment, Social and Governance (ESG). His work currently focuses on how temperature sensitivity and biodiversity performance measured by ESG metrics predict future stock returns.
Pengguo Wang
Professor of Finance and Accounting
Pengguo’s research focuses on the areas of capital markets, particularly valuation by applying information in financial reporting including the ESG disclosure. He examines whether the disclosure of ESG-related information helps in price discovery and explains the mechanism on how the ESG information may help a company to attract funds from the capital markets and the ESG engagements are not a waste of corporate resources.
Pu (Eleanor) Yang
Research Associate (part-time) in Sustainable Investment
Pu Yang’s research focuses on carbon valuation and the cost-benefit modelling of climate change. Her work has been published in leading journals such as One Earth and Global Environmental Change. She is currently interested in corporate governance and its impact on internal carbon pricing.
Xiaoxia Ye
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Associate Professor of Finance
Xiaoxia Ye is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Business School. Xiaoxia is currently working on numerous Sustainability related projects. In one of his recent working papers titled ‘How Do Voluntary Disclosures on Climate Risk and Their Tone Affect CDS Premiums?’, he and his co-authors study the effect of voluntary climate risk disclosure on Credit Default Swap (CDS) premiums and find that the informativeness of climate risk disclosure reduces the CDS premium, suggesting that climate risk is priced in the CDS market, where investors pay close attention to climate risk disclosures. Xiaoxia is also working with Prof. Charlie Cai and colleagues from other disciplines at the University of Liverpool on a funding application looking at Green jobs evolution in the UK and its policy implications.
Tiancheng Yu
Lecturer in Finance
Tiancheng is a lecturer in Finance at the University of Exeter Business School. His primary research interest is in the area of climate finance. His current research examines the determinants of corporate environmental policies and the role that climate risk plays in shaping corporate financial policies. He is also interested in sustainable finance topics such as green innovation and green credit and subsidies.
Lewis Grant
Honorary Associate Research Fellow
Senior Portfolio Manager, Global Equities, Federated Hermes Limited
Lewis joined Federated Hermes in February 2008 as a portfolio manager on the Global Equities team. In addition to his role as portfolio manager, Lewis is responsible for designing and implementing many of the team's systems. In particular, he created the proprietary risk-modelling system, MultiFRAME, which is used across all investment teams based in London. He joined from Aon Consulting, where he worked as an actuarial consultant specialising in providing valuations and asset-liability modelling to a range of corporate and institutional clients. Lewis graduated from the University of Warwick in 2003 with a Master's degree in Mathematics, Operational Research, Statistics and Economics and subsequently qualified as a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries.
Sebastian Tideman
Honorary Lecturer
Sebastian is an Assistant Professor in Accounting at Syracuse University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Bremen, Germany. His research focuses on the analysis of non- and semi-structured reporting data in the intersection of financial accounting, gender, and Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues. More specifically, some of his projects conduct textual analysis of earnings conference calls (e.g., on analyst’s questioning behavior) and corporate sustainability reports. He also investigates the structure of financial (e.g., disaggregation of financial statements) and non-financial disclosures (e.g., CSR and human rights disclosures). His work has been published in academic journals such as the Strategic Management Journal, The International Journal of Accounting, Journal of Business Economics, and Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment.
Anh Van Tran
MRes Student
Supervised by Chendi Zhang
Topic: Behavioural finance
Email: vt298@exeter.ac.uk
Fernanda Massarotto Dandaro
Visiting PhD Student
PhD student visiting from the University of Sao Paulo for 6 months funded by a Brazilian government scholarship
Topic: ESG in emerging markets.
Email: fmdandaro@usp.br
Sam Duncombe
PhD Student
Supervised by Gzregorz Trojanowski, Monika Tarsalweska, and Min Park
Topic: My research is concerned with how environmental, social and governance (ESG) signalling by private equity infrastructure funds affects how successful they are at raising new funds. This research provides insights on the susceptibility of investors to greenwashing.
Email: sd685@exeter.ac.uk
Chunying Guo
Research Associate
Chunying joined the University of Exeter Business School as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Land, Environment, Economics, and Policy Institution (LEEP) in July 2023. Prior to this, she was a visiting Ph.D. student at Exeter Sustainable Finance Centre (ESF).
She is currently working on the NERC-UKRI funded BIOESG project under Professor Ben Groom and undertaking research in sustainable finance at the interface of finance and economics, climate change, and biodiversity.
Email: rebecca_guo@tju.edu.cn
Esed Selmani Herab
PhD Student
Supervised by Grzegorz Trojanowski and Lora Dimitrova
Topic: Heterogeneity of Political Connections and Corporate Risk
Email: es807@exeter.ac.uk
Jiali Yan
Senior Lecturer in Finance and Accounting
Jiali’s primary fields of research are corporate finance and investment. Her research interests include socially responsible investment, Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) issues, climate finance, corporate disclosure, financial misconduct, and emerging markets. Examples of her work in sustainable finance include the potential conflicts of interest within the ESG rating industry and the dynamic relationship between ESG performance and financial performance
Shu Zhang
Lecturer in Finance
My research on sustainable finance is in three areas. One is about the role of government and regulation on firms' ESG practices; the second is ESG along customer-supplier relationships; the last one is about firms' E&S reputations.
Han Lin
Lecturer in Operations and Analytics
Han's primary research interests are within the field of machine learning, international trade, financial economics, enviornmental economics and applied econometrics. His ongoing research focuses on the impact of anomalous weather variations on supply chains. He also how investigate how firm-level reputational exposures to ESG and business misconduct risks affect the appointment of female executives and studies the factors and determinants of mutual fund performance by developing novel, causally and theory-informed Machine Learning (ML) techniques.