Education
Ph.D. in Finance (in progress) Merage School of Business, UC Irvine
M.S. in Business Administration - Finance Seoul National University
Bachelor of Business Administration Bachelor of Art in Psychology Ewha Womans University
Research Interest
My name is Hee-Seo, pronounced Hee-suh (close to “He saw”). I am currently a fifth-year PhD student, deeply interested in exploring behavioral finance, particularly in investor decision-making.
My research focuses on understanding how individual behaviors, cognitive biases, and market dynamics interact to shape financial world.
Through this website, I aim to share my academic journey and research updates. Whether you're a fellow researcher or simply curious about behavioral finance, I hope you’ll find something here that resonates with you.
Thank you for visiting, and I look forward to sharing more with you soon!
with David Hirshleifer, Jinfei Sheng, and Zheng Sun
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We test whether mental alertness, as proxied by sleep disruption, impairs investor trading performance. Using four complementary approaches, we document that retail investors who experience a later sunset time on average earn lower abnormal returns on their trades. These approaches include panel regression with household fixed effects, RDD based on time zone borders, comparison of different seasons and latitudes, and daylight saving changes. Further tests suggest that the sleep disruption effect derives from impaired investor attention.
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with Xindi He and Daniel Weagley
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We provide a comprehensive analysis of a large set of retail investor buy-side trading tendencies - systematic patterns in stock purchase behavior - documented in leading finance journals over the past 75 years. Using 14.5 years of trade-level data for both retail and institutional investors, we find that about 20% of documented tendencies are no more prevalent among retail investors than would be expected under random trading, and that institutions display only one-third as many tendencies as individuals. Among retail investors, the average tendency is associated with 128-basis-points lower returns over the next 12 months, with the stacking of multiple tendencies associated with progressively lower returns at the trade level. Analysis of individual tendencies reveals substantial heterogeneity: attention-related tendencies are especially costly, whereas those linked to investor familiarity are not. The prevalence and cost of tendencies also vary over time, intensifying during periods of elevated market volatility. Overall, fewer than half of the previously documented tendencies are both more prevalent than in random trading and associated with negative performance, conditional on other tendencies.
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:linkedin: Linkedin Page
:vm9nxqac_400x400: Author Page
Work in Progress
Languages
● English (fluent)
● Korean (native)
Awards
MFIN Outstanding Teaching Assistant UC Irvine | 2023, 2024
Ray Watson Doctoral Fellowship UC Irvine | 2024
High Pass on Comprehensive exam UC Irvine | 2023
DUO-Korea Fellowship ASEM-DUO | 2015
Beta Gamma Sigma, Business Honors Society Ewha Womans University | 2014-