Dr. Jie Chen, currently is an Associate Professor in Accounting and Finance at Leeds University Business School. He graduated from Nottingham University Business School China (NUBS China) in 2008.
Coming back to the campus, walked past the familiar lawn, Jie said，“It feels good to come back and our University is getting better and better.”
During his time in the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), he confessed that he was not the kind of people who studied very hard. He enjoyed playing the basketball and business games at his spare time.
He was impressed with UNNC’s “Boundary Freedom”. Students were given the right to find what they truly like and tried hard to approach the objectives.”
Every time he came back to China, he will gather with his classmates. Some of them started an enterprise; some of them have a very sweet family. They teased Jie as ‘big potato’ in academic circle.
Jie said he is destined to become an academic.
After graduation from UNNC, he went to UK for further study and became interested in conducting research. “I like this open process, to explore different questions, to do background research and finally have something come out.” He argued that doing research is totally different from taking exams. He laughed at himself that he is never good at taking exams, but he is the person fond of research.
Chance favors the prepared mind. When he is conducting the master’s thesis, he thought he should have a benchmark to summarize his student career. He took the research very seriously and he conducted a research about the prediction of a corporate’s bankruptcy model. That is, the possibility of a company’s short-term bankruptcy can be predicted through data, modeling. He compared different models and discussed the practical application.
After reading the draft thesis, his supervisor offered him an olive branch, “Would you like to do further study? “ In 2010, he became a PhD candidate in the University of Bristol.
There is always gain and loss in life. Jie said that during his PhD time, he did not come back home for five years due to the busy study.
Some pressures are intangible. “Doing research is a long-term work, you do not get your reward quickly, and the publication process at least takes two years, sometimes three years or even longer. “He described the process a “non-short-term pleasure” but a “great joy” in the end.
Currently, he has published many papers in the top journals in Finance area. He believed that the academic is conducting a social experiment, which means that hotspots and external regulations are observed and analyzed. “We are not talking about a connection between two things, we are trying to prove a causal relationship between them.
For example, in the wake of the financial crisis, there is a saying that “if it were Lehman Sisters，it would be a different world”. Looking deep into this hypothesis, Jie together with his collaborators studies “Female board representation, corporate innovation and firm performance”. This paper was published in the Journal of Empirical Finance.
We can see that there is a star rising in the finance research area. Best wishes to Dr. Jie Chen!