Satellite cloud imagery data from a retailer’s parking lot can be used to analyze equity risk pricing? The rapid development of big datais disrupting the way of obtaining information in the whole financial market and reshaping the information pattern of the financial market, and the development of the application of satellite technology also provides a brand-new perspective and tools for asset pricing research. In response to the unanswered question of how information asymmetry affects stock risk premium, Professor WANG Shujing and her team carried out an in-depth research, and her collaborative paper, “Is Information Risk Priced? New Evidence from Outer Space” (《Is Information Risk Priced? Is Information Risk Priced? New Evidence from Outer Space” has been published online in Management Science (one of the top 24 academic journals in UTD).

This paper is a typical scenario-driven study. Based on the specific scenario of satellite remote sensing data, the study utilizes cloud cover as a natural experiment to delve into the impact of information risk on equity risk premium. To do finance research with the characteristics of the times, we should focus more on new phenomena in the market and construct new scenarios that fit the actual situation, only in the new scenarios can we find unique problems or new solutions for classical problems. In the era of big data, we not only benefit from the multi-dimensional measurement of the real society brought by big data, but also think about how the change of big data affects the market itself. The interplay between financial markets and big data and their reshaping of each other are interesting questions to focus on in the future.