科学研究

Siyu Chen is a tenured Associate Professor, Ph.D. Supervisor, and Assistant Dean at the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Jinan University. She serves as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Population Economics and is a Fellow of the Global Labor Organization. Her research interests include labor economics, the digital economy, and household finance. Her work has been published in leading academic journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics (Editor’s Choice), Review of Economics and Statistics, Nature Mental Health, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Management World, and The Journal of World Economy. Her research has been featured by The Economist, Vox, VoxChina, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Bloomberg, Sina Finance, Phoenix Finance, and other media outlets. She has served as principal investigator for both General and Young Fund projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, as well as a General Program funded by the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province. Her honors include First Prize in the Guangdong Provincial Teaching Competition for Young Faculty Members at Undergraduate Institutions, Second Prize for Outstanding Teaching Achievements in Guangdong Higher Education, and Jinan University’s Award for Outstanding Academic Contributions by Young Scholars.

Algorithmic short-video platforms have transformed how individuals access information, including financial advice. We study how this new form of information intermediation shapes retail investment. We exploit Douyin’s February 2018 advertising campaign on trains along China’s Beijing-Kowloon Railway during the Spring Festival travel season, which generated persistent increases in platform adoption and usage along the railway corridor. Combining this natural experiment with administrative trading records from a large Chinese brokerage, we find that investors whose predicted routes home passed through the corridor subsequently increased monthly buy orders by 15% and experienced a decline in monthly portfolio returns of approximately 1 percentage point (2.6% of a standard deviation). Exposed investors shifted toward stocks receiving greater attention, with higher valuations and risk but lower profitability and growth, and their portfolios became more similar. The exposure also increased new-account openings, disproportionately attracting less educated and less financially literate investors, who subsequently traded more and earned lower returns. Evidence from investor-advisor communications suggests that Douyin usage does not increase overall engagement with financial advisors but is associated with more investment-related discussions and less expressed anxiety and hesitation among investors who already communicate with them. These effects attenuate substantially following the 2021 regulation restricting stock recommendations through short videos and livestreams. Taken together, our findings show that algorithmically curated financial content can redirect retail attention, reshape investment decisions, and broaden market participation while impairing investment performance.