Sangmin Simon Oh

This entry pertains to two events held a week apart: the Google Higher Education Faculty AI Fellowship Institute (Sunnyvale, September 17-18, 2026) and the AGI Economy Conference hosted by OpenAI (San Francisco, September 24, 2026).

This entry pertains to the European Summer Symposium in Financial Markets (ESSFM) 2026 — Banking and Corporate Finance. The conference was held at the Study Center Gerzensee, a scenic Swiss village near Bern.

This entry pertains to the Columbia Workshop in New Empirical Finance held April 10, 2026, at Columbia Business School. I was one of the organizers for this year’s workshop.

This entry pertains to the 2026 VSB Mid-Atlantic Research Conference in Finance (MARC) held March 20, 2026, at Villanova School of Business.

This entry pertains to the Columbia PE Conference held March 5-6, 2026, organized by my colleagues Mike Ewens and Emmanuel Yimfor.

In this post, I look at how the term non-bank has been used in NBER working papers over time and why it has come to mean very different things in different contexts. By scraping papers that explicitly use the term, I trace how “non-bank” shifts from a narrow description of shadow banking to a broad residual category that often obscures more than it clarifies. I thank Olivier Darmouni for inspiration.

This entry pertains to the Five-Star Conference held November 21, 2025. I discussed the paper “Asset Embeddings,” which can be found here.

This entry pertains to the UT Dallas 2025 Fall Finance Conference held October 3–4, 2025.

This entry pertains to the Carey Finance Conference held October 16–17, 2025. I presented my paper “Limited Risk Transfer Between Investors: A New Benchmark for Macro-Finance Models” on Day 1.

This entry pertains to the Yale Junior Finance Conference 2025 in New Haven.

This entry pertains to the Workshop for Assistant Professors in Finance (WAPFIN) @ NYU Stern.

This entry pertains to the Structured Finance to Fund Climate Solutions workshop, held on September 8, 2025 at the UC Washington DC campus.

This entry pertains to the NBER Summer Institute 2025 — Asset Pricing. Unlike other recaps, I summarize my thoughts by the different themes throughout the session.

This entry pertains to the European Summer Symposium in Financial Markets (ESSFM) 2025 — Asset Pricing. The conference was held at the Study Center Gerzensee, a scenic Swiss village near Bern.

This entry pertains to the NYU Stern Summer Climate Finance Conference. I summarize the presentations that I listened to, followed by some general reflections.

This entry pertains to the NBER Insurance Working Group Spring 2025 Meeting. I summarize the presentations that I listened to, followed by some general reflections.

This entry pertains to the NBER Asset Pricing and New Developments in Long-Term Asset Management (LTAM) Spring 2025 Meeting. I summarize the presentations that I listened to, followed by some general reflections.

This entry pertains to the 7th IMF Annual Macro-Financial Research Conference. I was only able to attend the first day, and I summarize my reactions to each of the papers followed by some outstanding questions at the end.

Portfolio choice and insurance represent two fundamental markets for risk-sharing — one where individuals actively acquire risk exposure for potential gains, the other where they pay to transfer risk away.

This entry pertains to the 2025 Baruch-JFQA Climate Finance and Sustainability Conference. I was only able to attend the second day, and I summarize my reactions to each of the papers followed by some outstanding questions at the end.

Ask any seasoned finance professor about how to generate research ideas, and one piece of advice you’ll often hear is “read the news.” But it’s never quite that simple. In this post, I provide a systematic approach that can help turn the inspiration from current events into a publishable research.

California faced devastating wildfires in 2024, driven by extreme weather, climate change, and urban sprawl. Here are 9 things I learned from the recent California wildfires as I took a deeper dive into the homeowners insurance market and related concerns.

In this post, I explore how a fundamental challenge in empirical asset pricing — the joint hypothesis problem — appears in many aspects of our daily lives. While we often take for granted that evaluation requires comparison, this simple principle leads to complications in how we assess everything from investment strategies to societal wellbeing. I thank Lucy Msall for comments.

In this post, I explore why governments may choose policies that align with OECD averages. I have a simple model to examine how uncertainty and risk aversion influence policy decisions that balance domestic needs with international standards.

Creating academic presentations is a peculiar art form, distinct from other types of public speaking. In this post, I share principles for crafting academic presentations that I’ve gathered from my short experience of giving seminars and — perhaps more importantly — sitting through countless others.

It’s not uncommon to hear academics say “Oh, I finally have my Figure 1!” — the killer graph that succinctly summarizes a paper’s key findings and captivates readers with its visual impact. In this post, I explore some of the interesting Figure 1’s in economics, dissecting what makes them so powerful and memorable.

While it is widely acknowledged that delivering a compelling seminar presentation can go a long way in finance and economics academia, concrete suggestions for improvement are surprisingly rare. In this post, I seek to fill this gap by exploring the key elements of an effective academic presentation in finance, drawing insights from some of the field’s best presenters.

This entry pertains to the Junior Finance Conference held at The University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business. I summarize my reactions to each of the papers followed by some outstanding questions at the end.

This entry pertains to the 3rd Annual Valuation Workshop held at The Wharton School on June 13-14, 2024. I summarize my reactions to each of the papers followed by some outstanding questions at the end.

Starting with this post, I intend on briefly summarizing the talks and panels at the conferences that I attend. My hope is that this will help me keep track of the many conferences to come and also incentivize me to pay more attention during the talks.

In this post, I briefly describe the insurance regulations within the United States, highlighting how regulation can act as a first-order force in shaping the incentives and decisions of insurance companies. I also highlight the features that are unique to P&C vs. life insurers. I’ve benefited from discussions with Manav Chaudhary.

Demand System Asset Pricing (DSAP) seeks to jointly understand asset prices, macro variables, characteristics, portfolio holdings and flows. In this post, I summarize frequently asked questions and clarify misconceptions associated with recent work in this area. This post is continuously updated.

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)—the 16th largest bank in the United States—was shut down by federal regulators on March 10, 2023. Here are 9 things I learned from the recent banking crisis.

In January 2023, I participated in the EconScribe Research Paper Workshop, an asynchronous session led by Varanya Chaubey. She is also the author of The Little Book of Research Writing, which helps structure your papers. In this post, I summarize the key lessons from the workshop.

Recently, there has been a discussion regarding the rise of collateralized fund obligations (CFOs), which pool together multiple private equity funds and issue securities backed by them. In this post, I summarize my brief investigation of their prevalence, economic motives behind their rise, and future research questions that may be of interest.

How should abstracts of papers be written to maximize impact? In this post, I evaluate the abstracts of academic papers written by my friends at graduate school using recent advancements in language models.

The past few years have seen many actors in the financial system take sustainability into account in their decision-making. In this post, I paint a broad picture of the related efforts and how they interact with one another.

Clustering standard errors can make or break papers. In this post, I discuss what are considered standard approaches to clustering standard errors, particularly focusing on asset pricing and corporate settings. I benefited from discussions with Fulin Li.

Central banks already come equipped with the dual goal of price stability and financial stability. In this post, I explore existing literature that explores the role of financial stability considerations in monetary policy, above and beyond its traditional financial stability tools.

With the broader availability of panel data, fixed effects (FE) regression models are becoming important and used widely for identifying causal effects. In this post, I discuss a few papers in which the usage of fixed effects is quite illuminating. I have benefited from discussions with Gurpal S. Sran and Jingtao Zheng.

The developments in DeFi, or decentralized finance, are much quicker than accompanied advances in academic discourse. In this post, I organize some questions based on my preliminary readings that will help us keep up with the fast-changing landscape. I plan on updating this list as the landscape evolves.

Much of academic discourse depends on a set of rigorously established “stylized facts.” Providing such facts rely on sound measurement, which is often harder than it seems. I discuss three recent examples that are worth noting.

On November 6th, 2021, Elon Musk tweeted that he would sell 10% of his stake in Tesla following the outcome of a Twitter poll. In this post, I use this episode as a lens into theories of asset demand and their role for prices. I have benefited greatly from discussions with Aditya Chaudhry.

A recent body of work extends the replicating portfolio approach to provide insights into valuation and measurement of key assets and entities of interest. In this post, I discuss some innovative examples that are worth noting.

In this post, I summarize some famous examples of selection bias in finance and economics. Hopefully they serve as a useful reminder that even when identification and estimation are sound, there are always lingering concerns about external validity.

In this post, I summarize key institutional details and historical episodes that come up consistently in seminars and job talks. For both empirical and theoretical research in finance, a solid understanding of these seems useful.

Skewness in the distribution of economic outcomes is underappreciated. In this post, I summarize some basic insights regarding skewness in three themes. I also describe why I think now is a particularly interesting time to focus on skewness.

In many empirical models within finance, one needs to decide whether to use variables as their levels or their changes. In this post, I briefly go over reasons why one may choose one versus the other.

In this post, I take a quick look at a new database on insurance frauds and discuss potential research questions related to this topic.

In this post, I explore the variations in Structural VARs (SVARs) and their recent applications. This is mostly an amalgam of notes based on my readings of multiple lecture notes, papers, and documentations.

Recently, I’ve spent some time implementing a particular task in both Stata and in Python. Despite this very useful reference, I’ve had a lot of struggle getting the output in both platforms exactly identical. Here is a list of things to watch out for when you’re puzzled by why the two sets of code yield different output.

Asset prices and portfolio holdings encode information about investor beliefs about the future and about investors’ concerns for risk. A natural empirical exercise is to use the financial market data to extract such information. In this post, I briefly outline a few approaches that have emerged (relatively) recently.

In this post, I explain the Khwaja-Mian (2008) estimator, which is a technique used to control for credit demand shocks in order to identify credit supply shocks i.e. the “bank lending channel.”