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Wenting Ma, assistant professor of finance at the Isenberg School of Management, along with co-authors Paige Ouimet and Elena Simintzi from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, were awarded second place for the 2025 Jensen Prize by the Journal of Financial Economics for their paper “Mergers and Acquisitions, Technological Change, and Inequality.”

Awarded annually by the journal, the Jensen Prize recognizes the top two papers across the fields of corporate finance and organizations. The prize is named after economist Michael C. Jensen, a pioneer in agency theory and a co-founder of the journal. The award was announced at the 2026 Western Finance Association meeting, which was held in Denver in June.

Ma’s research sits at the intersection of corporate finance and labor economics, where she studies how financing conditions, firm behavior, and technological change shape worker outcomes and pay gaps. 

In the paper, Ma, Ouimet and Simintzi show that mergers and acquisitions are an important channel through which technology spreads across firms. Drawing on confidential establishment-level data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they find that when technologically capable acquirers buy smaller, less tech-savvy targets, they invest in technology at those targets. This displaces routine, mid-income jobs (think bank tellers, bookkeepers, and back-office clerks) while raising demand for high-skill workers like financial specialists, engineers, and supervisors. The result is wider wage inequality within the establishment.

“Mergers and Acquisitions, Technological Change, and Inequality” was published in the Oct. 2025 edition of the Journal of Financial Economics and is available to read online here.