Zhiguo He is interested in the implications of agency frictions and debt maturities in financial markets and macroeconomics with a special focus on contract theory and banking. His recent research focuses on the role of financial institutions in the 2007/08 global financial crisis. He is also actively conducting academic research on Chinese financial markets that have been undergoing rapid development, including the stock market, local government debt, shadow banking, and interbank markets together with recent regulation changes; in relation to this research, he teaches a newly created elective MBA course, “Chinese Economy and Financial Markets.” Besides research in Chinese financial markets, he has also been writing academic articles on new progress in the area of cryptocurrency and blockchains. His research has been published in leading academic journals including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Finance, the Review of Financial Studies, and the Journal of Financial Economics. He has been an associate editor for the Review of Financial Studies and Management Science and currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal of Finance.

Professor He received his bachelor and master degrees from the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University before receiving his PhD from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2008. He has been named a 2014 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and has won numerous awards for his outstanding scholastic record, including the Lehman Brothers Fellowship for Research Excellence in Finance in 2007, the Swiss Finance Institute Outstanding Paper Award in 2012, the Smith-Breeden First Prize in 2012, and the Brattle Group First Prize in 2014. In autumn 2015 he was the dean’s distinguished visiting scholar at Stanford University, Graduate School of Business and in winter 2020 he will be a visiting professor of finance at Yale University, School of Management. Before joining the Chicago Booth faculty in 2008, he worked as a stock analyst at the China International Capital Corporation in Beijing in 2001 and visited the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University as a post-doctoral fellow.

Chong-En Bai is Mansfield Freeman Chair Professor, Dean of the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University. He is also the Director of the National Institute for Fiscal Studies of Tsinghua University. He earned his Ph.D. degrees in Mathematics and Economics from UCSD and Harvard University, respectively. His research areas include Institutional Economics, Economic Growth and Development, Public Economics, Finance, Corporate Governance and Chinese Economy.

Research on the impact of institutional environment on the development of the service sector won the Inaugural Pu Shan-Bank of China best paper award given by China Society of World Economics in 2008. Research on the return to investment won the Sun Yefang Best Economics Paper Award in 2009. Study on the model of national income distribution and its reform was funded by the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Sciences Major Grant. Research on the national income distribution won the Zhang Pei-Gang Award for Outstanding Achievements in Development Economics in 2012. Study on the challenges to and the measures for the development of the service sector in China won the second Prize for Excellent Research in Humanities and Social Sciences in the Category of Research Report in Economics, awarded by the Ministry of Education of China. Study on the relation between health insurance and consumption won the second Prize for Excellent Research in Humanities and Social Sciences in the Category of Research Paper, awarded by the Ministry of Education of China. Research on explaining China’s economic slowdown in the wake of the global financial crisis from the perspective of productivity won the Sun Yefang Best Economics Paper Award in 2016.

Professor Bai is a member of the executive committee of International Economic Association, and of the Scientific Council of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics. He currently serves on the editorial board of a few top economic journals in China. He also served on the editorial board of Journal of Comparative Economics from 2004 to 2006 and of The World Bank Economic Review from 2006 to 2008 as well as from 2011 to 2013.

Professor Bai is a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the “14^th Five-Year Plan” National Development Planning Expert Committee, the Chinese Economists 50 Forum, the China Finance 40 Forum, and Chinainfo 100. He was a member of the monetary policy committee of the People’s Bank of China from 2015 to 2018. He served as Adjunct Vice-President of Beijing State-Owned Assets Management Co., Ltd. from August 2011 to December 2012. He was a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution from 2006 to 2007.

Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, the College and the Harris School, as well as the Director of the Becker Friedman Institute and the interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. He previously served as the Chief Economist for President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, where he co-led the development of the United States Government’s social cost of carbon. Greenstone also directed The Hamilton Project, which studies policies to promote economic growth, and has since joined its Advisory Council. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and a former editor of the Journal of Political Economy. Before coming to the University of Chicago, Greenstone was the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at MIT.

Greenstone’s research, which has influenced policy globally, is largely focused on uncovering the benefits and costs of environmental quality and society’s energy choices. His current work is particularly focused on testing innovative ways to increase energy access and improve the efficiency of environmental regulations around the world. Additionally, he is producing empirically grounded estimates of the local and global impacts of climate change as a co-director of the Climate Impact Lab. He also created the Air Quality Life Index™ that provides a measure of the gain in life expectancy communities would experience if their particulates air pollution concentrations are brought into compliance with global or national standards.

Greenstone received a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University and a BA in economics with High Honors from Swarthmore College.

Lars Peter Hansen is a leading expert in economic dynamics who works at the forefront of economic thinking and modeling, drawing approaches from macroeconomics, finance, and statistics. He is a recipient of the 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Professor Hansen has made fundamental advances in our understanding of how economic agents cope with changing and risky environments. He has contributed to the development of statistical methods designed to explore the interconnections between macroeconomic indicators and assets in financial markets. These methods are widely used in empirical research in financial economics today.

The Nobel Prize recognizes this work, which has been used to test theories and models that have shaped our modern understanding of asset pricing.  His recent research explores how to quantify intertemporal risk-return tradeoffs and ways to model economic behavior when consumers and investors struggle with uncertainty about the future. Improving models that measure risk and uncertainty have important implications for financial markets, fiscal policy, and the macroeconomy.

His early research in econometrics was aimed at developing time series statistical methods to investigate one part of an economic model without having to fully specify and estimate all of the model ingredients. The applications he explored with several coauthors, such as Kenneth J. Singleton, Scott F. Richard, Robert Hodrick, and Ravi Jagannathan, included systems that are rich enough to support models of asset valuation and to identify and clarify empirical puzzles, where real-world financial and economic data were at odds with prevailing academic models.

Professor Hansen’s recent work focuses on uncertainty and its relationship to long run risks in the macroeconomy. He explores how models that incorporate ambiguities, beliefs, and skepticism of consumers and investors can explain economic and financial data and reveal the long-term consequences of policy options. Hansen, Thomas J. Sargent, and their coauthors have recently developed methods for modeling economic decision-making in environments in which uncertainty is hard to quantify.  They explore the consequences for models with financial markets and characterize environments in which the beliefs of economic actors are fragile.

Professor Hansen joined the faculty of the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics in 1981 and has served as department chairman and director of graduate studies. He is now David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, Statistics, Booth School of Business and the College. He was the inaugural director of the Becker Friedman Institute until July of 2017. He currently directs the Macro Finance Research Program housed under the Becker Friedman Institute.

Hansen also serves as co-principal investigator, along with Andrew Lo of MIT, on the Macro Financial Modeling Project (MFM). This research group works to develop macroeconomic models with enhanced linkages to financial markets, with the aim of providing better policy tools for monitoring so-called systemic risks to the economy.

In addition to the Nobel prize, Hansen has also received many other awards and honors. Hansen won the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Economics, Finance and Management “for making fundamental contributions to our understanding of how economic actors cope with risky and changing environments.” He also received the CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications in 2008 and the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics from Northwestern University in 2006. In 1984, he and Kenneth J. Singleton were awarded the Frisch Medal from the Econometric Society for their paper, “Generalized Instrumental Variables Estimation of Nonlinear Rational Expectations Models.”

Professor Hansen is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Finance Association. He also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and past president of the Econometric Society.

Professor Hansen holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and political science from Utah State University and a doctorate in economics from the University of Minnesota.  Hansen has also received numerous honorary degrees, including an honorary doctorate from Utah State University in 2012.

Guojun He is an associate professor in economics and management & strategy at the University of Hong Kong. He holds a concurrent appointment at the Energy Policy Institute of University of Chicago (EPIC) and serves as the research director of its China Center (EPIC-China).
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Prof. He’s research tries to address some of the most challenging problems faced by developing countries and seeks to produce empirically-grounded estimates for optimal policy design. The majority of his work focuses on understanding the benefits and costs of environmental policies, while he also has broader research interest on development and governance issues.

Chang-Tai Hsieh conducts research on growth and development. Hsieh has published several papers in top economic journals, including “The Life-Cycle of Plants in India and Mexico,” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; “Misallocation and Manufacturing TFP in China and India,” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; “Relative Prices and Relative Prosperity,” in the American Economic Review; “Can Free Entry be Inefficient? Fixed Commissions and Social Waste in the Real Estate Industry,” in the Journal of Political Economy; and “What Explains the Industrial Revolution in East Asia? Evidence from the Factor Markets,” in the American Economic Review.

Professor Hsieh has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco, New York, and Minneapolis, as well as the World Bank’s Development Economics Group and the Economic Planning Agency in Japan. He is a Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Senior Fellow at the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development, and a member of the Steering Group of the International Growth Center in London.

He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, an Elected Member of Academia Sinica, and the recipient of the Sun Ye-Fang award for research on the Chinese economy.

Zheng Michael Song is a Professor at the Department of Economics of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University. Before joining CUHK, he was an Associate Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth. Professor Song is a co-editor of China Economic Review and an associate editor of Journal of European Economic Association. He is an academic committee member of China’s National Economics Foundation and an executive board member of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies. His research focuses on Chinese economy and macroeconomics. His papers appear on leading academic journals including American Economic Review and Econometrica. In 2013, he won Sunyefang Economic Science Award.