Zhiguo He

Biography

• Fuji Bank and Heller Professor of Finance, University of Chicago, Booth School of Business
• Finance PhD program area advisor, University of Chicago, Booth School of Business
• Director of Becker Friedman Institute for Economics in China, University of Chicago
• Faculty co-director of the Fama-Miller Center, University of Chicago
• Special-term Alibaba Foundation Professor, Tsinghua University, School of Economics and Management
• Research associate at National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
• Senior fellow at Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER)
• Member of the academy committee, Luohan Academy
• Member of the Council of Advisers, Hong Kong Institute for Monetary and Financial Research

Professor 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 teaches an elective MBA course, “Chinese Economy and Financial Markets,” and is conducting academic research on Chinese financial markets including the stock market, local government debt, shadow banking, and interbank markets together with recent regulation changes. Professor 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, the Journal of Financial Economics, and Management Science. 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. He serves as the guest editor of the Review of Finance for the “Special Issue on China” in 2020-2021.

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. 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.

In Autumn 2015 Professor He was the Dean’s distinguished visiting scholar at Stanford University, Graduate School of Business, and in winter 2020 he is a visiting professor of finance at Yale University, School of Management. In January 2020, he testified at U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) Hearing on “China’s Quest for Capital: Motivations, Methods, and Implications.”

Research Interests

Corporate finance; contract theory; frictions in financial markets.

Academic Areas

• Finance