This entry pertains to the 2026 VSB Mid-Atlantic Research Conference in Finance (MARC) held March 20, 2026, at Villanova School of Business.
Philly is home for me, so any excuse to go back is a good one. I had heard great things about MARC from last year's participants and was eager to attend and present our paper on individual investors in private equity.
The conference is a single-day affair with four sessions, a keynote, and a reception, all tightly organized by a team of track chairs across corporate finance, financial institutions, market microstructure, and investments.
Jayoung Nam (SMU) presented "Cross Trading in the Corporate Bond Market," coauthored with Lina Han, Stacey Jacobsen, and Veronika Pool. The paper documents that cross trading is surprisingly prevalent in corporate bonds, exceeding 11% at the industry level, by comparing inferred mutual fund trades from CRSP holdings changes to reported TRACE volume. A 2022 fair value rule nearly halved off-tape crossing, especially for high-yield bonds.
I don't know the corporate bond market well enough to have strong priors here, but the discussant, Sebastian Plante, brought up good points, particularly whether families simply shifted from cross trading to agency trading in response to the regulation.
John Shim (Notre Dame) presented "Latency and the Look-Ahead Bias in Trade and Quote Data," coauthored with Robert Battalio, Craig Holden, Matthew Pierson, and Jun Wu. John is a very good presenter, and the paper delivered a clear, important message: the SIP/TAQ data that most researchers use has a serious look-ahead bias. After a trade, quotes move in the direction of that trade, but the SIP records this as happening before the trade, flipping the sign on 13% of trades.
The discussant, Dominik Roesch, characterized this as mainly a signing problem and argued that effective spreads are unaffected, but I think John is right that the implications are broader than that. This is a very clear example of how far institutional details can take you in empirical work.
Huaizhi Chen (UT Dallas) presented "Dinner Table Alphas," coauthored with Sean Cao, Lauren Cohen, and Hugo Zhao. The paper asks whether fund managers whose spouses hold senior industry positions earn alpha in the spouse's industry, and the answer is yes. The data work here is impressive: they link Morningstar fund holdings to L2 household data to Revelio Labs career histories. I was a bit surprised at what the data could achieve.
Marina Niessner's discussion was also good, pushing on whether it is the spouse's network rather than the dinner table itself that generates the information advantage, and suggesting clever tests using geographic distance, COVID lockdowns, and spouse industry changes.
Preetesh Kantak (Indiana) presented "The Relative Price Premium," coauthored with Yun Joo An, Fotis Grigoris, and Christian Heyerdahl-Larsen. This was a cool paper. It speaks to an old idea: when we have inflation, it is not inflation per se that hurts people. It is about the fact that certain goods become more expensive than others, and these relative price changes, when they move in a certain direction, hurt more. The paper shows that firms producing goods whose relative prices rise earn 0.35% per month more, and this is distinct from aggregate inflation by construction. Price dispersion carries a negative market price of risk, reducing CAPM pricing errors by 20-57%.
Sabrina Howell (Harvard) delivered the keynote on "Retail Access to Private Equity Funds." The talk was excellent and gave a good preview of her work.
She laid out the case for broadening access while carefully flagging the tensions: PE value creation depends on illiquidity, but retail investors' comfort zone is liquidity. She discussed the vehicles available (drawdown funds, interval funds, tender offer funds) and noted that the Department of Labor is expected to green-light 401(k) PE investment as early as April 2026. (I also appreciated that she gave a shout-out to our paper on individual investors in PE, which was presented later that afternoon.)
Haelim Anderson (Andersen Institute) presented "Interest Rate Caps and Bank Loan Supply," coauthored with Matthew Jaremski. This is a financial history paper set in New Jersey during the Great Depression, 1928-1935. When interest rate caps on small loan brokers were lowered, 80% of brokers exited the market, and commercial banks did not absorb the displaced borrowers. Raising the cap back did not bring them back either.
Toomas Laarits's discussion raised the question of whether the differential behavior reflects increased risk premia rather than the cap itself. The paper is a nice reminder that whenever something new happens in financial markets, it is not that difficult to find a historical parallel. The external validity of older cases is always debatable, but studying the history is still valuable.
Hyeyoon Jung (NY Fed) presented "Economics of Property Insurance," coauthored with Jaehoon Jung. Using 8.7 million household insurance policies, the paper finds that moral hazard costs are tiny (about $7 per contract), but the deductibles and coverage limits that mitigate moral hazard leave households exposed to roughly 29% of expected losses, with the worst outcomes for low-FICO households and high-tail-risk properties.
The paper puts moral hazard at the center of how insurance contracts are designed. Our usual textbook example for moral hazard is auto insurance, so thinking about how it does or does not apply to property insurance, where homeowners have limited control over damage from natural disasters, was a useful exercise. Mallick Hossain's discussion pushed exactly on this point, questioning whether the Holmstrom framework fits when effort choice is so constrained.
Jewon Shin (Penn State) presented "Discerning Value from M&A Transcripts," coauthored with Charles Cao, Matthew Gustafson, and Wei Wang. The paper uses LLMs to classify synergy claims in over 2,100 M&A conference calls into 23 categories (15 cost-saving, 8 revenue-enhancing). Cost-focused calls are associated with higher announcement returns and better post-merger operating performance, while revenue-focused claims, especially cross-selling, get weaker market reactions. An interesting application of LLMs to corporate finance. Daisy Wang's discussion pushed on the external margin, noting that these calls are selective, which I thought was a fair point.