Recently, the paper entitled "CEO network centrality and bank risk", with Prof. MAI Yong as the corresponding author, was published in Journal of Corporate Finance, the top international journal in the field of corporate finance.

The paper examines the impact of CEO network centrality (the centrality of the CEO in the social network) on bank risk. Based on a sample of 471 bank holding companies (BHCs) in the United States from 1999 to 2018, CEO network centrality is found to be negatively related to bank risk due to the fact that CEOs with higher levels of network centrality implement less risky policies. 

The study also finds that information flow and CEO power are two channels through which CEO network centrality reduces bank risk. The empirical results of the thesis still hold when a range of methods are employed to mitigate the endogeneity problem. The paper's research further extends the new chain of research focusing on specific positions/ranks of executives/directors in social networks. The thesis provides new research ideas on the role of bank CEOs in mitigating systemic risk in the banking sector.

One of the paper's co-authors, JIN Pengcheng, was a master's student at the ECUST School of Business under the supervision of Prof. MAI Yong, and is now a PhD student in finance at Fudan University. The paper is dunded by the 2022 National Natural Science Foundation of China under the Major Research Programme (Project No. 92146002).

Journal of Corporate Finance is an authoritative journal in the field of corporate finance, which contains excellent academic results related to corporate finance, covering a wide range of topics such as capital structure, corporate investment and financing, corporate governance and other fields, and boasts a high academic reputation.