Caroline J. Zhang

Caroline Jinglan Zhang

  jinglan_zhang@ucsb.edu

  2049 North Hall, UCSB

Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with research interests in Behavioral and Experimental Economics, Behavioral Finance, and the Economics of Education.

I study the impact of performance feedback on individual decision-making in both investment and educational contexts.

I have been teaching an upper-level undergrad course in Corporate Finance and Asset Pricing at UCSB since Fall 2023.


I am on the job market in the 2024-25 academic year! You can find my CV here.

Working Papers

The Feedback-Driven Disposition Effect: An Experiment [pdf]
Job Market Paper

I experimentally study how observing performance feedback throughout the investment process affects individuals’ risk-taking decisions following gains versus losses. I find that while individuals initially plan to take on more risk after gains than losses, observing performance feedback significantly leads them to deviate from initial plans, revealing the well-documented disposition effect – in which individuals are more likely to stop investing after gains than losses. Many participants are unaware of their deviations following losses, but they do recognize, to some extent, their tendency to deviate after gains. I further show that the impact of recent gains and losses on risk-taking decisions changes over time: in the early stages of investment, individuals are more likely to stop taking risk after a gain, but as they approach the end, they tend to continue investing after observing a recent gain.

Motivating Academic Success: The Role of Leaderboards in Shaping Student Study Behavior
(Joint with Anna Jaskiewicz, Ruth Moralesa, and Dingyue (Kite) Liu)


Lying for Efficiency or Fairness? [pdf]
(Joint with Jaimie Lien and Jie Zheng)

Publications

Financial Cycle and Monetary Policy (Joint with Yulu Chen and Yong Ma) - Journal of Financial Research (in Chinese), Vol. 441, 2017.

Financial Cycle, Business Cycle and Monetary Policy: Evidence from Four Major Economies (Joint with Yong Ma) - International Journal of Finance and Economics, No. 4, 2016.

Financial Development, Environmental Quality and Economic Growth (Joint with Shushu Li and Yong Ma) - Sustainability, No. 7, 2015.

Teaching

Instructor of Record

UC Santa Barbara

Econ 134A: Financial Management (Corporate Finance and Asset Pricing)
Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Summer 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2025(scheduled)

I was appointed as the Instructor of Record for this course based on my strong teaching performance as a Teaching Assistant across two quarters, where I earned an outstanding average student evaluation rating of 1.4 (on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the highest). Below are resources I've designed, including review slides for the midterm and final exams, as well as a collaborative document on TA section instructions with Xhulio Uruci.

[Midterm 1] [Midterm 2] [Final] [TA Section Notes]

Teaching Assistant

UC Santa Barbara

  • Econ 134A: Financial Management
  • Econ 130: Public Finance
  • Econ 140A: Intro to Econometrics
  • Econ 145A: Data Wrangling for Economists
  • Econ 1: Intro to Economics

Tsinghua University

  • Advanced Econometrics II (PhD)
  • Behavioral Economics
  • Intermediate Economics