Celine Yue FEI
Welcome!

Department of Economics,
University of Mannheim
Contact Information:
L 7, 3–5 – Room 341 (3rd floor)
68161 Mannheim
​Email: [email protected]

I am teaching the Financial Economics (undergrad) and Fintech (master) courses at Mannheim.
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Research Areas
  • Venture Capital, ​Private Equity
  • ​Fintech
  • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
  • Matching Models

I worked in the Finance Area at Kenan-Flagler Business School of UNC at Chapel Hill before. I obtained my Ph.D. in Economics from Toulouse School of Economics. 
CV
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Research Papers
Portfolio Management in Private Equity, with Gregory W. Brown and David T. Robinson 
NBER Working Paper No. w31664
  • Presented at: 2023 AFA, 2023 FIRS, 2023 Columbia Private Equity Conference (*), 2023 Mitsui Finance Symposium (Michigan Ross), 2023 Summer Institute of Finance Conference (Shanghai Jiao Tong SAIF), 2023 Lapland Investment Fund Summit​ (Aalto)​, 2023 SKEMA Corporate Restructuring Conference, ​2022 Finance, Organizations and Markets Conference (USC Marshall), 2022 WashU St. Louis Annual Conference on Corporate Finance (*), 2022 UNC Annual Private Equity Research Consortium ​(*), 2022 Conference on Financial Economics and Accounting​​ (GSU), 2022 Society of Quantitative Analysts conference (*), 2021 IPC Research Symposium (*)
  • ​Matlab Code
Abstract: General Partners (GPs) in private equity face a trade-off between focusing their skills and effort on fewer investments to earn higher returns, or investing more broadly to reduce risk through diversification. Using a novel, deal-level dataset of 5,925 global investments from 1999 to 2016, we show that these portfolio considerations are important for understanding fund-level private equity returns. The largest investments in PE funds typically have the lowest returns on average, but are also the least risky. Returns and risk are both increasing in industry or geographic concentration. And while GP skill only accounts for 4%-6% of the total return variation of a typical investment, it accounts for more than 40% of the return variation at the fund level. These findings show that GPs use portfolio construction, and not just deal selection, to seek risk-adjusted fund-level returns.
​* Presented by coauthor​
What Drives Racial Minorities to Use Fintech Lending? 
  • Selected Presentations: ​2021 NBER Entrepreneurship Working Group, 2023 MFA, 2023 Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance Annual Conference, 2023 OFR Rising Scholar Conference, 2023 University of Oregon Summer Finance Conference​
​ Abstract: Using a national sample of Paycheck Protection Program restaurants, I find evidence of a more negative minority-non-minority rating gap for fintech lenders, which suggests taste-based discrimination of Becker (1957). To quantify various channels' magnitude, I estimate an empirical matching model where I find that fintech-minority matches generate more value than other matches. Moreover, this fintech-minority additional value channel is the most important channel in explaining racial disparities in fintech usage. Disabling this channel reduces minority borrowers' usage of fintech by approximately 70%. Disabling lending relationships and bank branch channels only reduces minority borrowers' usage of fintech by less than 2%.
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Can Government Foster the Development of Venture Capital?
Best Paper Award at 2022 China International Forum on Finance and Policy (CIFFP)


Journal Referees
Management Science, ​Review of Financial Studies, ​Journal of Corporate Finance

​Teaching

Univ of Mannheim (Instructor): Financial Economics (undergrad); Fintech (master)
UNC Kenan-Flagler (Instructor): Corporate Finance BUSI408; evaluation 4.6/5
​Toulouse School of Management: Corporate Finance (Master); evaluation 3.6/4
Toulouse School of Economics (TA): Macroeconomics PhD Core, Macroeconomics, Econometrics
​Discussion [Link]