YANG, Chen

Assistant Professor Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management Faculty of Engineering The Chinese University of Hong Kong Postal Address: Room 511A, William M.W. Mong Engineering Building The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong Email: cyang at se.cuhk.edu.hk Phone: +852 3943-8322

Teaching [Blackboard@CUHK]

• SEEM3590 Investment Science, Fall 2019
• SEEM3580 Risk Analysis for Financial Engineering, Spring 2020

Research Interest

Publications

1. Designing Stable Coins (with Yizhou Cao, Min Dai, Steven Kou and Lewei Li).
   submitted, 2018.
   
   Stable coins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to other stable financial assets such as U.S. dollar, are desirable for payments within blockchain networks, whereby being often called the “Holy Grail of cryptocurrency.” However, existing cryptocurrencies are too volatile for these purposes. By using the option pricing theory, we design several dual-class structures that offer a fixed income crypto asset, a stable coin pegged to a traditional currency, and leveraged investment instruments. To understand the impact of the proposed coins on the speculative and non-speculative demands of cryptocurrencies, we study equilibrium with and without the stable coins. Our investigation of the values of stable coins in presence of jump risk and black-swan type events shows the robustness of the design.


2. Stochastic Representation for Nonlocal Problems (with Min Dai and Steven Kou).
   submitted, 2017.
   
   We establish a stochastic representation for a class of nonlocal parabolic terminal-boundary value problems, whose terminal and boundary conditions depend on the solution in the interior domain; in particular, the solution is represented as the expectation of functionals of a diffusion process with random jumps from boundaries. We discuss three applications of the representation, the first one on the pricing of dual-purpose funds, the second one on the connection to regenerative processes, and the third one on modeling the entropy on a one-dimensional non-rigid body.


3. Inventory Management for High-Frequency Trading with Imperfect Competition (with Sebastian Herrmann, Johannes Muhle-Karbe and Dapeng Shang).
   SIAM Journal on Financial Mathematics, forthcoming. [SSRN|arXiv]
   
   We study Nash equilibria for inventory-averse high-frequency traders (HFTs), who trade to exploit information about future price changes. For discrete trading rounds, the HFTs' optimal trading strategies and their equilibrium price impact are described by a system of nonlinear equations; explicit solutions obtain around the continuous-time limit. Unlike in the risk-neutral case, the optimal inventories become mean-reverting and vanish as the number of trading rounds becomes large. In contrast, the HFTs' risk-adjusted profits and the equilibrium price impact converge to their risk-neutral counterparts. Compared to a social-planner solution for cooperative HFTs, Nash competition leads to excess trading, so that marginal transaction taxes in fact decrease market liquidity.


4. Hedge Fund Leverage with Stochastic Market Conditions (with Li Zhao, Wenli Huang and Shenghong Li).
   International Review of Economics & Finance 59:258-273, 2018. [Article]
   
   Hedge funds face stochastic market conditions. We develop a dynamic framework to analyze hedge fund optimal leverage choice, in which the extra return and volatility of the alpha-generating strategy shift between good and bad states at random times. We find that the optimal leverage, the manager's risk attitude and her compensation in each state reflect the possibility for state shifts, in contrast to the results of the one-state model. The manager always intends to increase leverage when the probability of a coming crisis is higher; however, the leverage is significantly reduced when the crisis arrives.


5. Optimal Tax-timing with Asymmetric Long-term/short-term Capital Gains Tax (with Min Dai, Hong Liu and Yifei Zhong).
   The Review of Financial Studies 28.9:2687-2721, 2015. [Article]
   
   We develop an optimal tax-timing model that takes into account asymmetric long-term and short-term tax rates for positive capital gains and limited tax deductibility of capital losses. In contrast to the existing literature, this model can help explain why many investors not only defer short-term capital losses to long term but also defer large long-term capital gains and losses. Because the benefit of tax deductibility of capital losses increases with the short-term tax rates, effective tax rates can decrease as short-term capital gains tax rates increase.

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