Rate My Professor Yanhui Wu

Yanhui Wu is Professor of Economics and of Management and Strategy and Area Head of Economics at the HKU Business School, University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. in Economics and M.Sc. in Economics with Distinction from the London School of Economics in 2011, and a B.A. in Economics from Sun Yat-sen University. Prior to HKU, where he joined as Associate Professor in 2020 and was promoted to Professor in 2024, he served as Assistant Professor of Finance and Business Economics at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, from 2011 to 2020. Earlier, he was an award-winning financial journalist in China. He currently directs the Digital Economy Research Institute at the HKU Business School Shenzhen Campus since 2023, serves on the Executive Committee of the HKU Center for AI, Management, and Organization since 2025, and holds fellowships as Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and Non-residential Fellow of the 21st Century China Center at UC San Diego.

His research interests encompass media economics, organizational economics, the Chinese economy, digital platforms, and the economics of AI. Publications appear in top journals such as Econometrica, American Economic Review, Management Science, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and Journal of Comparative Economics. Key works include 'Social Media and Collective Action in China' (Econometrica, 2024, with Bei Qin and David Strömberg), 'Media Bias in China' (American Economic Review, 2018, with Bei Qin and David Strömberg), 'Why Does China Allow Freer Social Media? Protests versus Surveillance and Propaganda' (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2017, with Bei Qin and David Strömberg), 'Competition, Contracts, and Creativity: Evidence from Novel Writing in a Platform Market' (Management Science, 2022, with Feng Zhu), and 'Street-level Responsiveness of City Governments in China, Germany, and the United States' (Journal of Comparative Economics, 2023, with Ekkehard Köhler and John G. Matsusaka). He was awarded the 2025 HKU Research Output Prize for research excellence. Wu teaches Economics of Organization and Strategy (PhD), Economics of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation (Master's), Managerial Economics (MBA), and Causal Inference (undergraduate).