Rate My Professor Jin Zhang

Professor Jin Zhang serves as Professor of Finance and Head of Department (since 2021) in the Department of Accountancy & Finance at the Otago Business School, University of Otago. He earned his B.S. in 1985 and M.S. in 1988 from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, followed by a Ph.D. in 1996 from the California Institute of Technology. Post-doctorate, he held a one-year position as an associate at Morgan Stanley in New York. His academic career spans teaching Financial Engineering at City University of Hong Kong from 1997 to 2001, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology from 2001 to 2004, and the University of Hong Kong from 2004 to 2012, where he was Associate Professor in the School of Economics and Finance. At the University of Hong Kong, he directed the Master of Finance program and served as Associate Director of the Center for Financial Innovation and Risk Management from 2009. He joined the University of Otago as Professor of Finance in 2012.

Professor Zhang specializes in derivatives and quantitative finance, an interdisciplinary domain combining finance and applied mathematics—encompassing partial differential equations, stochastic calculus, and applied probability—with practical applications in the financial industry. He has authored numerous publications in top-tier journals, including "VIX futures" in the Journal of Futures Markets (2006, 275 citations), "Testing range estimators of historical volatility" in the Journal of Futures Markets (2006, 177 citations), "The implied volatility smirk" in Quantitative Finance (2008, 141 citations), "GARCH Option Pricing Models, the CBOE VIX and Variance Risk Premium" in the Journal of Financial Econometrics (2013, 138 citations), "Option-pricing formulas with skewness and kurtosis" in Review of Derivatives Research (2026), and "VIX term structure and future realized volatility" in Applied Economics (2025). His scholarship has amassed over 4,200 citations on Google Scholar, underscoring his influence in empirical asset pricing and volatility modeling. Zhang holds editorial positions as Associate Editor for Applied Economics and Applied Economics Letters since 2020. He has been honored with the Otago Business School Research Excellence Award in 2022 and named Divisional Finalist for the OUSA Supervisor of the Year Awards in 2022. He convenes FINC306 Derivatives and FINC405 Mathematical Finance and has supervised multiple PhD students on derivatives markets and volatility topics.