Focus on Dr. Jialan Wang

Author: Irati Hurtado 

Dr. Jialan Wang, Finance Professor at Gies College of Business, was one of the four recipients of the Greg Gulick Honorary Research Award in 2021. The award, granted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) consisted of $25,000 in AWS credits to researchers studying either cancer or COVID-19.  

Wang, who has been at the University of Illinois since 2016, had ample experience investigating bankruptcy and how consumers use the financial system. However, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, “I decided to work on a project that was slightly different to others I had worked on before,” Wang says.  

Her research proposal included using real-time data to monitor the economy as the COVID-19 pandemic evolved. Wang and her team of researchers from other universities used the Greg Gulick Research Award to examine how three important economic areas were affected by the pandemic: bankruptcy, access to credit by women and minority entrepreneurs, and consumer spending and merchant resilience. 

The area where Wang and her team have made the most progress is bankruptcy. They have found that bankruptcy filings have declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, in part due to the government’s stimulus measures, although not all economic sectors have been equally affected by these policies. Wang has presented these findings at different research institutions, including the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Federal Reserve, and the MIT. Regarding publications, “I and my research team are actively working on finalizing the research paper for public release and submission to a peer-reviewed journal. We hope to do this by the end of the summer,” Wang says. 

Work on the other two areas is still in progress. Preliminary results show that while women entrepreneurs have not faced greater financial constraints, they are still less likely to become entrepreneurs. As Wang continues to wait for more information from the pandemic, Wang and her team presented their present work on bankruptcy at a number of places in 2022, including the American Social Sciences Alliance (ASSA), the Federal Reserve Board, Harvard Business School, UC Berkeley, the Federal Reserve of New York, University of Connecticut Macro Seminar, and Imperial college, among a number of others.  

With respect to consumer spending and merchant resilience, preliminary findings suggest that consumer spending is informative about firm stock returns, especially for smaller firms. Research is also ongoing on the effects of government stimulus measures such as unemployment insurance and the child tax credits. In particular, preliminary research suggests that as much as $10 billion in unemployment insurance funds distributed by federal and state governments between 2020-2021 was the result of fraudulent activity. 
 
In addition to receiving AWS credits, the Greg Gulick Honorary Research Award, also involved getting help from the office of Research IT. In this regard, Wang’s primary interaction with this office was “to review the initial Privacy Impact Assessment and methods of de-identifying and preserving data security and storage while complying with all laws and data stewardship guidelines.”  This was a key process, as privacy must always be protected when working with confidential data sources. Although Wang did not need help from Research IT to use AWS, as she was already familiar with it, some graduate students who were part of the team did take advantage of this opportunity to learn about AWS. 

Another challenge for Wang was having to manage a very distributed team. As some of her collaborators were not on campus, they relied on collaborative technology to share do-lists, manage tasks, track the project history, and communicate about their work. 

Last fall, Wang and her team received an extension to continue using AWS credits to finish their project: “I’m really thankful to have received the Gulick Award, as it has enabled me to carry out work that has been well-received by the research community and policymakers and that I hope will inform the public and contribute to policies that will help individuals and firms weather the economic volatility that started with the initial COVID-19 wave and that continues to this day.”