PhD Defense X. Ma

This doctoral thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 studies the risk, price, and return features on art investments and compares them with other alternative assets and traditional financial markets. Chapter 2 investigates the color effects in abstract art on pricing and returns by combining a large-scale laboratory experiment and real auction analysis. Chapter 3 applies textual analysis and incorporates and categorizes provenance information as novel factors in pricing and return models.

Xiaoyin Ma (Jiangsu, China, 1988) graduated from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in 2011 (Valedictorian) with a B.A. in Financial Engineering and a B.S. minor in Financial Statistics. He studied in the Research Master-Ph.D. program in Finance at Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 2011 to 2014 and meanwhile worked as a research assistant at China Academy of Financial Research. From September 2014 to June 2019, he worked as a Ph.D. researcher at the Department of Finance, Tilburg University, winning the Tilburg Alumni Research Funding twice. He was an exchange student at the University of Cologne during his undergraduate study. He was a visiting researcher at Economic Science Laboratory at the University of Arizona in 2015 and has been a research associate since then. As of June 2018, he is an Assistant Professor in Finance at Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research interests include alternative investments, experimental finance, and asset management.

• Location: Cobbenhagen building, Portraits room (access via Koopmans building)
• Supervisors: Prof. L.D.R. Renneboog, Prof. C.N. Noussair