Prof. Vera Chau

Vera Chau is Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Geneva. Before her doctoral studies, Professor Chau worked in the US investment banking industry.

Professor Chau analyzes how new technology gets diffused throughout firms with particular interest in the energy space and its implications for the clean energy transition. In one study, she uses the spread of fracking technology to study the role of knowledge networks in driving firms to adopt or shift their capital investment focus away from old technologies and toward new ones. Her results show that not all spillovers are alike, as general productivity spillovers do not have the same impact on adopting new technology despite evidence in the literature that they do affect investment levels. This emphasizes the importance of understanding technology adoption as a mechanism that is separate from investment itself. In a different body of research, Professor Chau studies how the industrial structure of financial intermediaries affects loan servicing within the residential market. Her results show that mortgages serviced by integrated institutions, which are both a servicer and a lender, tend to refinance more frequently with their own servicers with lower servicing fees but at higher mortgage rates. Interestingly, Fintech intermediaries behave oppositely and are shown to charge higher fees but at lower rates, suggesting that they target borrowers who may not be tempted to refinance and charge them markups when doing so. Overall, these results show that the pass-through of monetary policy depends largely on the financial provider.

• Portfolio Management and Asset Classes
  • Personal Finance and Household Choices
  • Real Estate
• Corporate Finance and Governance
  • Capital Budgeting and Investment Policy
  • Financing Policy and Capital Structure
• Frontier Topics
  • Sustainable Finance