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Yang Bai is a finance Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri-Columbia. For the academic year 2023-2024, Yang teaches financial modeling. The course covers valuation, bond, investments, and options, with a focus on the anlytics related to finance theories. Yang has also taught Real Estate Appraisal and Surveys of Business Finance. He received the Outstanding Graduate Teaching award at the University of Missouri in 2021.

Yang is active in research. His current research interests include:

Investments,

Machine Learning and Big Data in Finance,
Mergers and Acquisitions, and

Regulatory Enforcement.

Yang has received several honors for his research. His recent paper with Inder Khurana and Ruixiang Wang examining the SEC's interest in founder-CEO firms is among the semifinalists of the Best Paper Award of the FMA 2023 Annual Meeting.

His paper with Fred Bereskin, Xiaohu Guo, and Miriam Schwartz-Ziv investigating the SEC's regulatory interests with respect to board gender diversity won the Best Paper Award of Boca Corpoaret Finance and Governance Conference 2022.

Yang also has been awarded the third prize in the 19th annual Dr. Richard A. Crowell Memorial Prize competition sponsored by PanAgora Asset Management for his paper that applies machine learning classification models to investigate return predictability and its consequences.^†

Yang is a Certified Financial Risk Manager (FRM) by the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP). He holds a master's degree in statistics and a bachelor's degree in math, both from the University of Georgia.

Before entering the Ph.D. program, Yang worked for the data science team at the Center of Excellence of Assurant, Inc. in Atlanta. During his stay at Assurant, he worked on advanced modeling and infrastructures. He built actuarial models, predictive models, credit risk models, pricing models, customer profiling models, etc., using both traditional statistics and modern machinel learning methods. He also served as an internal consultant for different business units and a liaison to outside consultants.

In his spare time, Yang is a fan of gym excercises, outdoor activities, and technology. Yang lives in Columbia, Missouri.

To contact Yang, please send your email to yangbai@mail.missouri.edu .

^{† For those who are interested, the Crowell Prize competition is widely known for recognizing leading academic research in asset pricing that connects theory and practice. Interested vistors can check out the history of first prize winners.}