Faculty Spotlight
Giang Nguyen
Giang Nguyen is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Smeal College of Business, Penn State University. Her research lies at the intersection of market microstructure, financial econometrics, and fixed income markets, with a focus on how information, liquidity, and institutional frictions shape price formation across financial markets. Her work has been published in top academic journals, including the Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science, and the Journal of Econometrics, among others.
A core area of Dr. Nguyen’s research examines the U.S. Treasury market. She investigates how market microstructure features affect liquidity provision, dealer behavior, and price discovery. Her research shows that reducing tick sizes improves market quality by enhancing competition for liquidity provision. For electronic trading of on-the-run Treasury securities, her work reveals that both trades and limit orders contribute to price formation—especially around macroeconomic announcements—with informed traders strategically using limit orders. Her econometric models of intraday liquidity, volatility, and volume dynamics offer new tools for monitoring market liquidity, particularly during stress periods. She also documents how dealers intermediate new Treasury issuance and shows that their inventory management has evolved in the post-crisis period due to regulatory constraints and increased competition from non-dealer institutions. Collectively, this body of work has helped shape academic and policy understanding of the structure, efficiency, and resilience of the U.S. Treasury market—one of the world’s most systemically important markets.
Dr. Nguyen’s second line of research focuses on the U.S. municipal bond market, where she studies how information frictions, investor behavior, and public policy affect municipal bond pricing and capital access for local governments. Her work shows that investor inattention contributes to pricing inefficiencies. In addition, she finds that the economic value of bond insurance has declined sharply since the financial crisis, yet persists due to habit and procedural convenience, particularly among issuers with weaker governance. She also examines how local opioid abuse increases borrowing costs for municipal governments, highlighting how community-level crises impair financial outcomes. Another study shows that greater investor sophistication and transparency have compressed underwriting fees, thereby reshaping the role of intermediaries and ultimately affecting municipal governments’ access to capital. Most recently, she finds that anti-ESG laws passed in states such as Texas and Oklahoma have not resulted in significant increases in municipal borrowing costs as conventionally claimed—suggesting that market adaptation and issuer heterogeneity may neutralize the effects of headline policy shifts.
Across these studies, her work advances understanding of how frictions and institutional dynamics affect municipal borrowing costs and market access.
Beyond traditional markets, Dr. Nguyen's emerging research explores price formation in cryptocurrency and decentralized finance (DeFi) markets. Her work highlights the unique role of social media in crypto asset pricing, showing that collective sentiment refines and amplifies traditional news signals—an especially important mechanism in retail-driven markets. She also analyzes the microstructure of a centralized crypto exchange, using full limit order book data to document how informed trading and liquidity provision respond to heightened volatility. In the DeFi space, she develops a new price impact model tailored to trading on a decentralized exchange with automated market makers, explicitly accounting for arbitrage activity in the absence of centralized intermediaries. This growing body of work offers foundational insights into how information, incentives, and market structure interact in digital asset markets.
Dr. Nguyen’s research has won a best paper award (the NASDAQ Best Paper Award in Market Microstructure) and been presented at leading academic conferences (including the AFA, WFA, and SFS Cavalcade) and policy institutions (such as the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Brookings). She served as a Financial Economist at the SEC during 2019–2020 through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act program and has ongoing collaborations with researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
She currently serves as an Associate Editor at the Journal of Applied Econometrics and is an active member of the academic community, regularly reviewing for top journals and serving as a discussant, session chair, panelist, and program committee member at major finance conferences.
At Smeal, Dr. Nguyen teaches Investment Analysis to undergraduates and mentors Ph.D. students. She has served on multiple departmental and college-level committees and advises several student organizations, including the Penn State Wealth Management Association (PSWMA), a recently established group aimed at increasing student exposure to the growing field of wealth management.
Dr. Nguyen earned her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before entering academia, she worked as a senior analyst in the Securities and Finance group at NERA Economic Consulting and as a management consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers Vietnam.