Celine Yue FEI
Welcome! I am currently a postdoc at Kenan-Flagler Business School of UNC at Chapel Hill. I obtained my Ph.D. in Economics from Toulouse School of Economics.
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Research Areas
  • Venture Capital
  • Private Equity
  • ​Fintech
  • Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)

Google Scholar; UNC Official Page​; CV

Contact Information:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Kenan-Flagler Business School
Chapel Hill, NC, 27599
​Email: Celine_Fei@kenan-flagler.unc.edu

​I am on the 2022/2023 job market.
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Research Papers
1. Crowding-in in Venture Capital  Job Market Paper
  • ​Presented at: UNC Brownbag, AFA-AFFECT workshop (scheduled), EMC (scheduled), CIFFP (scheduled)​​​
2. Portfolio Management in Private Equity, with Gregory W. Brown and David Robinson 
  • Presented at: AFA (scheduled), USC Finance, Organizations and Markets Conference, WashU St. Louis Annual Conference on Corporate Finance (*), UNC Annual Private Equity Research Consortium ​(*), Conference on Financial Economics and Accounting​​, Society of Quantitative Analysts conference (*), IPC Research Symposium (*), St. Gallen, SWUFE-IFS
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.​
3. What Drives Racial Minorities to Use Fintech Lending? Evidence from a Structural Estimation 
  • Presented at: NBER Entrepreneurship Working Group, OCC Research Symposium on Financial Technology, CEAR-CenFIS Conference on Financial Innovation, Global AI Finance Research Conference (scheduled)​
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%.
4. IPO Market Liberalization and Venture Capital Development, with Ulrich Hege
  • Presented at: AFFECT New Ideas Session

5. Can Government Foster the Development of Venture Capital?
  • Presented at: CICF, SFS Asian-Pacific Cavalcade, WRDS Advanced Research Scholar Program, European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, HEC Paris PhD Workshop, Royal Economic Society PhD Meeting​
Abstract: This paper examines the positive and negative aspects of government venture capitalists (VC). Using China as a laboratory, I show that government VCs expand the market by attracting more private VC deals. Using political turnovers as an instrument variable, I establish a causal relationship. The reaction from private investors declines as the number of years that have passed since government investments. On the dark side, government VCs underperform private VCs in terms of whether a portfolio business exits through an IPO. In a more competitive market, the underperformance is more severe, suggesting that an agency problem is one explanation.
Work in Progress
6. Too Political to Fail: Restructuring Through Private Equity, with Ulrich Hege and Josh Lerner

Journal Referees
Management Science, ​Review of Financial Studies

​Teaching

UNC (Lecturer): Corporate Finance BUSI408
​Toulouse (TA): Corporate Finance (Master), Macroeconomics PhD Core, Macroeconomics (Undergraduate), Econometrics (Undergraduate)