Rate My Professor Zhiwu Chen

Professor Zhiwu Chen is the Chair Professor of Finance and Cheng Yu-Tung Professor in Finance at the University of Hong Kong Business School. He earned his Ph.D. in financial economics, along with M.A. and M.Phil. degrees, from Yale University in 1990. Earlier, he received an M.S. in systems engineering from Changsha Institute of Technology in 1986 and a B.S. in computer science from Central-South University of Technology in 1983. His academic career spans several prestigious institutions: he served as Professor of Finance at Yale University from 1999 to 2017, Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1990 to 1995, and Associate Professor of Finance at Ohio State University from 1995 to 1999. At HKU, he holds leadership roles as Director of the Centre for Quantitative History, Director of the Hong Kong Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, and member of the HKU Council since November 2018. He is also a Special-Term Visiting Professor at Peking University and Tsinghua University.

Professor Chen's research focuses on finance theory, sociology of finance, quantitative history, economic history, emerging markets, and China’s economy and capital markets. His contributions have earned significant recognition, including the “Economist of the Year 2023” award from South Reviews Magazine, the Graham and Dodd Award for the best paper in the Financial Analysts Journal in 2013, the Merton Miller Prize in 1994, and a record HK$67.32 million grant under the Areas of Excellence Scheme in 2022 for the Quantitative History of China project. Notable publications include “Banking on the Confucian Clan: Why China Developed Financial Markets So Late” with Chicheng Ma and Andrew Sinclair in The Economic Journal (2022), “Hedging Desperation: How Kinship Networks Reduced Cannibalism in Historical China” with Zhan Lin and Xiaoming Zhang in the Journal of Comparative Economics (2024), “Rise of the South: How Arab-led Maritime Trade Transformed China, 671–1371 CE” in the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review (2025), and books such as Logic of Civilization: How Humans have Innovated to Deal with Risk (CITIC Press, 2022) and multiple volumes of Quantitative History Research co-edited with others (2015–2024). One of his papers, “Empirical Performance of Alternative Option Pricing Models,” ranks among the top 50 most cited articles of all time in the Journal of Finance.