New Schulich Faculty
YELENA LARKIN
Yelena Larkin is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Schulich School of Business. Prior to joining York University, Larkin was an Assistant Professor of Finance at Pennsylvania State University. She obtained her PhD in finance from the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University. Throughout her career, Yelena has taught finance courses at several well-known universities around the world, including Cornell University, Pennsylvania State University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before starting her academic career, Yelena worked as an investment analyst at various regulatory and private institutions, including the World Bank and the Bank of Israel.
Assistant Professor of Finance
Yelena’s primary interests are in the area of empirical Research Keywords
corporate finance, with
• • • •
particular focus on product
Product Markets Financial Policy Mergers and Acquisitions Human Capital
markets and financial policy.
Yelena’s primary interests are in the area of empirical corporate finance, with particular focus on product markets and financial policy. Through her research, she studies how the nature of firms’ products and services, as well as the competitive landscape of industries in which they operate, affect financial and investment decisions. Yelena has published her work at top finance journals, and her research has been cited by media sources around the world, including The Wall Street Journal, and U.S. News & World Report. Yelena has delivered numerous academic presentations at the most prestigious conferences in her field, such as the AFA and the WFA Annual Meetings, as well as UBC Finance and FSU SunTrust Conferences. Yelena has served as an ad hoc referee for finance and management journals, including top-tier journals such as Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, and the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis.
6 Schulich School of Business
Research Projects Yelena’s research examines the link between product market environment and financial and investment decisions of firms. She is currently working on a number of projects that study the intangible aspects of firm production and management, product market competition, and characteristics of mergers and acquisitions. In her most recent project, Yelena and her co-authors examine the evolution of product market competitiveness and demonstrate that despite popular beliefs, U.S. markets have become more concentrated over the past two decades. To arrive at this conclusion, Yelena shows that the number of publicly-traded firms has plummeted, while the remaining ones have become the dominant ones in the industry. Moreover, firms that operate in industries with the largest increase in concentration have enjoyed higher profit margins, positive abnormal stock returns, and more profitable merger deals. Taken together, Yelena’s findings demonstrate that the U.S. industrial landscape is dominated by a small number of large firms that have been enjoying increased market power, wider profit margins and better investment opportunities through merger deals. At a broader level, her findings suggest that the nature of U.S. product markets has undergone a structural shift that has potentially weakened competition. Yelena has also developed an interest in the area of mergers and acquisitions while working on a project that examines the degree of similarity between the products and technologies of bidding and target firms. Although existing literature suggests that the likelihood of a merger is higher when two firms are more similar to each other, this project documents an interesting phenomenon: many times, target firms settle for the second best bidder, instead of waiting for a better offer from a more suitable bidder. To understand this puzzle, Yelena and her co-author have developed a model that demonstrates under which conditions targets choose to settle for a less complementary bidder instead of waiting for a more suitable match. They also test the hypotheses of the model empirically, and show that the degree of merger complementarity is related to industry competition, the target’s risk of becoming obsolete, and its visibility to potential bidders. ◆