Yao Li

I am a third-year PhD student in Finance at the Swiss Finance Institute and HEC Lausanne. My research focuses on empirical asset pricing in bond and loan markets, with a particular interest in macro-financial factors, financial intermediaries, and machine learning methods. I also use textual analysis to measure information contained in financial and economic texts.

Email: yao.li@unil.ch

Working Papers

  1. Treasury Bond Excess Return Prediction: Machine Learning Insights (with Michael Rockinger)

    • Conference: 5th Frontiers of Factor Investing Conference (2026); 18th Annual Society for Financial Econometrics (SoFiE) Conference (2026); 5th Annual Hong Kong Conference on FinTech and AI in Finance (2026); SFI Research Days (2026)

  2. Pricing and Predicting Syndicated Loan Returns

  3. Timing the Term Structure of Government Bond Yields with Neural Networks (with Michael Rockinger)

Master’s Thesis

Li, Y. and Rockinger, M., 2024. Unfolding the Transitions in Sustainability Reporting. Sustainability, 16(2), p.809.

Research