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
  • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

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. What Drives Racial Minorities to Use Fintech Lending? Evidence from a Structural Estimation 
  • Presented at: ​2021 NBER Entrepreneurship Working Group, 2023 MidWestFA (scheduled), 2023 EasternFA (scheduled), 2022 OCC Research Symposium on Financial Technology, 2022 CEAR-CenFIS Conference on Financial Innovation, 2022 Global AI Finance Research 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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2. Portfolio Management in Private Equity, with Gregory W. Brown and David Robinson 
  • Presented at: 2023 AFA (scheduled), 2023 Columbia Private Equity Conference (scheduled), 2023 Lapland Investment Fund Summit​  (scheduled)​, 2022 USC Finance, Organizations and Markets Conference, 2022 WashU St. Louis Annual Conference on Corporate Finance (*), 2022 UNC Annual Private Equity Research Consortium ​(*), 2022 Conference on Financial Economics and Accounting​​, 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.
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3. Crowding-in in Venture Capital 
  • ​Presented at: UNC Brownbag, 2023 AFA-AFFECT workshop (scheduled), 2022 EMC, 2022 CIFFP, 2023 EasternFA (scheduled) ​​​
  • Best Paper Award at 2023 China International Forum on Finance and Policy (CIFFP) 
Abstract: By exploiting a unique policy experiment in China and difference-in-differences methodology, I find that government investments crowd in private investments, with a multiplier of 0.88-0.93. The impact is most pronounced in less developed regions and in the earlier stage of developing the VC sector. Using administrative data, I provide micro-level evidence of the crowding-in effects transmitting in a diminishing pattern through network linkages among limited partners, indicating that government investments have a signaling role on private investors.
4. IPO Market Liberalization and Venture Capital Development, with Ulrich Hege
  • Presented at: 2022 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​
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)
​Discussion [Link]