IOANNIS BRANIKAS

branikas@uoregon.edu

UNIVERSITY OF OREGON

Office Contact Information

Charles H. Lundquist College of Business
1208 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403
Mobile Phone: 609-375-5994

Academic Appointment
Assistant Professor of Finance, University of Oregon, Lundquist College of Business
2018 to present

Education
Ph.D. Economics, Princeton University, 2018
Thesis Title: “Essays on Portfolio Choice”
Committee: Harrison Hong, Jakub Kastl (Chair), Motohiro Yogo

M.A. Economics, Princeton University, 2014

M.Sc. Economics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Valedictorian, 2012

B.A. Economics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Valedictorian, 2010

Research and Teaching Fields

Financial Economics, Industrial Organization

Teaching Experience
Instructor
Summer 2018 Microeconomics for MPP students
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

Teaching Assistant in the Department of Economics at Princeton University

Spring 2017, 2016 Asian Capital Markets
Teaching assistant for JC de Swaan
Fall 2016, 2015 Financial Investments
Teaching assistant for Martin Cherkes, Harrison Hong, Yacine Ait Sahalia
Spring 2015, Fall 2014 Introduction to Economics
Teaching assistant for Elizabeth C. Bogan, Uwe E. Reinhardt

Professional Activities
Referee for the International Journal of Central Banking

1
Conference Presentations
• 45th Annual Conference of the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics (EARIE 2018),
Athens, Greece, September 2018
• 7th Helsinki Finance Summit on Investor Behavior, Helsinki, Finland, August 2017
• 52nd Annual Conference of the Western Finance Association (WFA 2017), Whistler, BC, Canada, June 2017

Honors, Scholarships, and Fellowships

July 2017 XiYue Best Paper Award of CICF 2017
for the paper “Location Choice, Portfolio Choice” (with Harrison Hong and Jiangmin Xu)
2012 – 2018 Princeton University Graduate Fellowship
2012 – 2016 Stanley J. Seeger Fellowship

Job Market Paper

“Advertising Exposure and Portfolio Choice: Estimates Based on Sports Sponsorships”
Abstract: Product market advertising by raising the awareness of a company's brand is thought to increase the
demand for a company's stock as well as its products. I construct a dataset of publicly traded sports sponsors in the
US and develop an instrument for investor exposure to advertising via these sponsorships. I show that investors
living in a city where local sports teams are sponsored by a given company, local or non-local, are more likely to
purchase stocks in that company. The portfolio effects from sports sponsorship are large and suggest that advertising
is more important than even local bias.

Research Papers

“Location Choice, Portfolio Choice” (with Harrison Hong, Columbia University and Jiangmin Xu, Peking University)
Abstract: Households hold undiversified stock portfolios of firms headquartered near their city of residence. Leading
explanations like the familiarity heuristic assign a causal role for proximity. However, households optimally locate in
a city based on unobservables such as optimism about a city’s prospects, which can be correlated with latent local
stock demand. Using location-choice models, we instrument distance with tastes for life amenities like climate to
show that local bias is also driven by this selection. We propose a decomposition of local bias into household priors
about stocks, using location choice model residuals, and familiarity, whereby confidence about stock-payoff signals
rise with proximity.

“Estimates of the Costs and Benefits of Information in Stock Markets” (with Harrison Hong, Columbia University
and Jiangmin Xu, Peking University)
Abstract: A significant fraction of information in stock markets is produced by sell-side analysts working at banks,
whose research is bought by institutional investors. We estimate the costs and benefits of this information by
modeling the effect of analyst coverage on fund manager portfolios. We quantify two distinct channels: coverage
drawing managerial attention to stocks versus improving the precision of managerial signals. We can then calculate
the marginal benefit of information as the elasticity of aggregate institutional demand with respect to one additional
analyst. Assuming convex cost functions for coverage, we can then measure the marginal cost of producing
information for each stock.