Editor: Vikas Kakkar
If you have any inquires or comments related to the newsletter, please call Ms. Lily Yeung at (852)2788 8804
Professor Murray Kemp is currently Professorial Research Fellow of Macquarie University, Australia. Professor Kemp was the keynote speaker at “Recent Advances in International Economics II”, an international conference organized by the Department of Economics and Finance and the Research Centre for International Economics of the City University of Hong Kong, August 21-22, 2003. He was interviewed by Vikas Kakkar in September 2003 when he was Visiting Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Here are some excerpts from the interview.
Interview with Professor Murray Kemp
VK: Maybe we should start with a few questions on your background and upbringing. I’ve read that you’re a direct descendent of Captain Anthony Fenn Kemp, who came to Australia in the early part of the 18th century and had “Kemps Creek” named after him in New South Wales.
MK: Well he came to Australia at the tail-end of the 18th century – not with the first fleet, but soon after, within 5 years in 1793. Came out as a member of the New South Wales Corps, an army corps. He had his ups and downs…he led the mutiny against Captain Bligh. After leaving the corps, he came out and settled in Tasmania and appropriated a huge gift of land from the governor and lived there for the rest of his life, which was a very long one. He had 19 children, and for obvious reasons, was later known as the “Father of Tasmania”. He was bit of a rascal…but there’s a town named after him called “Kempton”. In fact, until very recently, members of the family lived there.
VK: Where did you grow up? What kind of a childhood did you have?
MK: I was born in Melbourne, but moved into country towns soon after. I grew up in towns that typically had between 300 to 600 people, so I think of myself as a country boy.
VK: Was there anything in your early years that led you to economics?
MK: My father was a bank manager – but that had nothing to do with it. At school I took courses that allowed me time to practice football and cricket, which meant I took no mathematics and no science. I took history, English literature, anything that met at times that did not clash with cricket or football. That’s a typical story.
VK: When and how did you decide to become an economist?
MK: When the time came to go to university, I thought well, perhaps I should be a medical doctor. Then I quickly found I was not qualified. I had no Latin, which was necessary in those days, no physics, no chemistry. So I enrolled in a joint course in Arts and Commerce and economics was a core course to both of them. And I found I liked it very much. I quickly realized I would need some Maths, and took the appropriate steps, and found that it didn’t clash with cricket at the University level! So it was the best of all worlds.
VK: How did you end up going to the United States for your graduate studies?
MK: Well, let’s go back to the preceding question about the choice of economics as a subject. As an undergraduate, I found it easy. It was all Keynesian in those days -- the simplest kind of Keynes. The general theory had been simplified. The IS-LM diagram seemed to be all there was to it. So cricket and economics were a good mixture. Then Benjamin Higgins came to visit as a Research Professor – the only research chair in the country -- and he stayed for long enough to supervise my Master’s thesis, which was on a Keynesian topic. When I was all for going up to Canberra to a job in the Treasury, he said “No, you must go off to the States.” This was a novelty. I was the first as far as I know, in economics, to break the old tradition of going to Oxford, Cambridge, or LSE. And he sent me off to (Johns) Hopkins. That’s how I came to go there, but while it was an enjoyable two years that I spent there, they were all behind the times. None of them knew any mathematics: Samuelson’s Foundations had come out. Arrow’s book on the “Impossibility Theorem” was about to come out. And we weren’t equipped. We realized it, fortunately, while we were still at Hopkins. We all trotted off to the math department, told them our problem, and asked them if they had anything that would be suitable. Some of us took advanced calculus, some took algebra. We all found something. And a very good thing we did it too because then we realized that what we were getting even in the math department wasn’t nearly enough for the new economics that was emerging. When I finished at Hopkins, and went up to McGill for my first job, I found that all the young people who had just joined the department were in exactly the same pickle. We lacked mathematics and we knew it. By then Arrow’s book was out. We did exactly the same thing we’d done at Hopkins – we trotted off to the math department and asked if there was someone who taught mathematical logic. There was a young man who had just joined the department, who, by the way, is a famous mathematician now. He gave us a course in logic – five in the class, three of them economists taking it not for credit!
VK: Going back a little bit, what was your doctoral thesis in Hopkins all about?
MK: Well, I carried on with what I had got from Ben Higgins, strict Keynesian economics. We had learned a bit more from Fritz Machlup at Hopkins. And from the two people who come over from Washington to give graduate courses – J.J. Polak, former student of Tinbergen and Head of the Research Department of the IMF, and T.C. Liu, who later went to Cornell as Professor of Econometrics. But they were all good Keynesians so we didn’t learn anything fundamentally new from them. It was only when we were exposed to Samuelson and Arrow that we knew that we had a long way to go.
VK: Your early work at McGill was on macroeconomics and welfare economics. What were the issues in welfare economics that attracted your attention?
MK: Well, there was this group there that included a well-known Robinsonian from Cambridge. He was a very fine theorist, right across the board, but published very little. We started writing papers on Arrow’s book. I wrote one paper with him jointly and one by myself, which I sent off to Ursula Hicks who was then looking after the RES. She wrote back within a week accepting the paper. They were really pleased that there was another side to the story because Arrow had been in Oxford and given them a breathtaking performance. In my paper I essentially said that this is what political philosophers have known for hundreds of years. What’s new is the mathematics. But it’s no surprise to the philosophers that there is an impossibility theorem. The problem has no solution. You can’t find a constitution that satisfies the axioms that Arrow cooked up. And the philosophers have known that for hundreds of years … ever since Hobbes and Locke. I said if you are a utilitarian, prepared to assume that utilities are comparable across people, there is no problem. There is a solution. We weren’t proposing that we go back to utilitarianism, but just to put the problem in focus.
VK: Many non-economists or less orthodox economists criticize Welfare Economics on the grounds that the notion of Pareto Optimality ignores issues of fairness and social justice. Would you agree that ruling out interpersonal comparisons makes welfare economics almost useless for the policy makers, who often must make such comparisons at least implicitly?
MK: It’s a bit unfair to Pareto. Pareto did find a way of ensuring that interpersonal comparisons weren’t needed. Of course you needed compensation – that’s the Paretian compensation principle. But the rest I agree with. I’ve never had any inclination to go beyond Pareto. I certainly never had any sympathy with people who argue for interpersonal comparability or even inter-temporal comparability of the same person’s utility. For me that is also an interpersonal comparison because you are not the same person. There have been serious attempts to get around the objection to Benthamism by people like Harsanyi, and more recently the Harvard philosopher, Rawls. But I don’t accept the veil of ignorance that they want to throw over the whole scene. And I can’t really follow my old friend Amartya Sen in his attempt to get beyond Pareto either. I think that’s where we are and that’s where we’ll always be.
VK: Your interests gradually shifted from welfare economics to micro-based trade models. How did the transition come about?
MK: I left McGill and went to MIT. Charlie Kindleberger had begun to realize that modern trade theory was getting a bit beyond him, and he asked me if I would take over his graduate class, which I did. And for one whole year I kept one lecture ahead of the students, learning trade theory all over again. But I had a wonderful group of students. Henry Wan came to the lectures though he had actually passed the course the year before with Kindleberger. But he knew I would be on the examining committee, so he felt it would do him good to get another perspective on trade theory! That’s the only time I have ever taught an advanced course in trade theory. Later I went back to Australia and began to write up my lecture notes and that became the text book that was published in 1964.
VK: A distinguishing feature of your research in trade is that it was quite mathematical from the beginning. Was there any special reason for this?
MK: Well I learned trade theory basically from Paul Samuelson, my colleague at MIT. Unknown to Paul I found that one of the secretaries had the key to a cupboard that no one quite knew what it contained. But I found that it contained all of Paul’s off-prints. So I asked her if she would give me one copy of each so long as it wasn’t already the last copy, which she did.
VK: Your 1962 JPE paper with Ron Jones was a classic that helped build the central framework for the HOS model. How did this collaboration come about?
MK: I wrote the paper, and Ron refereed it. And he wrote such a long and helpful referee’s report that I wrote to the editor, when I sent back the revised paper, and suggested that the referee be a coauthor! We had met each other before that but we didn’t collaborate in the usual sense.
VK: Your 1972 IER paper with Henry Wan is another classic that established gains from trade in an Arrow-Debreu framework. It seems that many scholars in the profession have challenged this work. Would you care to summarize this controversy?
MK: Well, I didn’t get to the 1972 proof in one jump. Earlier Paul Samuelson and I had written two separate papers which were published together in the Economic Journal and in my paper I tried to extend his proof of the gains from trade which applied only to a small country. And when Paul read what I had written, he wrote an additional paper and they were published together. But later I realized that the proof wasn’t complete, something was missing. And Henry Wan and I got together when I was visiting Berkeley for a year. Why was it much criticized? Basically because it is Arrow-Debreu – that’s the level of generality we aimed at. And most trade theorists, at least at that time, didn’t know much about Arrow-Debreu or McKenzie for that matter. And I think that is still true. Indeed it may even be more true today when trade theory has degenerated and gone back to partial equilibrium, than it was when the paper came out, when McKenzie was in full stride at Rochester, and Rochester was producing most of the good trade theorists in North America. Well, I think it is fair to say that most of those who’ve written papers criticizing that paper didn’t know much about Arrow and Debreu. The first paper was by Lestor Thurow. I never met him, but judging from his paper, he didn’t know much about Arrow-Debreu. The other papers should not have been written. They all came out of CORE. Most of them were students of Gabszewicz, a very excellent general equilibrium theorist, but he didn’t take part in the writing of the papers. They misunderstood the 1972 paper in one way or another – what was involved in compensation, at what stage the compensation was paid, and so on. I sorted all that out in a paper that I wrote in the Japanese Economic Review with Koji Shimomura. But still it happens! And people are so emotionally opposed to the notion that free trade is better than no trade that there will always be objections. People were not prepared to read the original papers and see that they rest on lump sum compensation. They can be criticized for that reason. There has been a big debate in which one of your countrymen – Avinash Dixit – and Henry and I, have been at opposing sides. Avinash in his textbook claims that anything that can be done by lump sum compensation, which we all know is an impractical policy measure, can also be achieved by a non-lump sum, tax-based compensation. Avinash doesn’t make many mistakes, but this was a genuine mistake!
VK: You’ve made seminal contributions to almost all areas of trade. Looking back on your enormous output, what is/are your favorite paper(s)?
MK: Well, I was asked last year by a Japanese university, which gave me a great honor, to select 4 papers so they could republish them in book form to mark the occasion. For that occasion I chose four related papers because I thought that would make more sense. But I wouldn’t choose those papers -- not all of them anyway -- in answer to your question. I think my first paper on the gains from trade even though it had a small blemish is the one that gave me most pleasure. It was a major contribution and it was my first paper that I felt really proud of. It appeared in the EJ in 1962. The next paper was a joint paper with Yew Kwang Ng, one of the great Chinese economists, who teaches at Monash University in Australia. We found that a claim by Paul Samuelson was not correct. He’d claimed that the Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function requires only ordinal information. We found that that’s not true, and for two people who’d felt that Samuelson had more to do with their upbringing as economists than anyone else, this gave us a twinge of sadness. But that twinge of sadness was greatly outweighed by the sheer pleasure that we’d found something important! Apart from those papers, I think the paper I wrote with Henry Wan on Customs Unions and then the follow up paper that was written with Koji Shimomura would round out the four papers that gave me greatest pleasure. They were all hard work. Some of papers that I think have been good papers were ten minutes in the perception, a little longer for writing. But these four were hard work.
VK: A distinguishing feature of your career has been that you have been somewhat of a peripatetic – you have visited and taught at numerous universities all over the world, and have also collaborated with many scholars. Is there any special reason for this?
MK: Take the last part first because it is fresh in my mind. After our first joint paper – the 1972 paper with Henry Wan – I realized that I could write better papers if I at least sometimes shared them with other people who had skills I didn’t have or didn’t have in sufficient quantity. So I’ve written many papers with Henry over the years, at intervals of perhaps ten years. But whenever I felt the need to get back to Henry, or he felt I that had something helpful to him, we came together again. We are in the middle of writing two papers right now.
About the peripatetic part, I married a French girl, who was also an archaeologist. Bringing up our children perfectly bilingually meant putting them in a French school in Australia, and eventually going and spending time in Paris. Other displacements were caused by my wife’s interests – needing to dig the surface of the world in some other place than Australia. Also, I had stayed away from Australia long enough, and at a period of my life when you make lasting friendships. Those friends were all somewhere else and that was an extra incentive for going there and seeing them from time to time and settling down for year, half a year, doing a bit of teaching somewhere else.
VK: What do you think are the key issues in the theory of international trade now? What would you advise a young scholar in trade theory to work on?
MK: In trade theory, the normative side is in good shape. The important work has always been (in the) Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie tradition, so it’s unaffected by the criticisms I will level in a minute at descriptive theory. I think normative theory has come to the end of the road – there’s a big “Stop” sign halting further progress. The reason we can’t go any further is the same reason we can’t go any further in welfare economics. Descriptive trade theory, I think, is a wasteland. Two years ago I taught first year trade for the first time in my life. I taught them the elementary topics – the principle of comparative advantage, Heckscher-Ohlin, and realized I was talking nonsense. So I gave them a week off while I thought about it. Then we met again and I started teaching from papers that I was scribbling as fast as I could go, rewriting substantial parts of descriptive trade theory. Now I’ve told you at various times what I think is wrong, representative agents and so on and so forth. So yes, it is a great field for graduate students to go into because they have to start all over again.
VK: You also influenced the teaching of economics in China, helping reformulate the curriculum in the late eighties. What was that experience like?
MK: I went as a member of a team of five people, each supposed to be an expert in a particular branch. We all went to different universities and lectured to students who were sent to that university from all over the country. We taught for 5 weeks. Since they didn’t have any market economics, most of the time was spent teaching principles. And then quickly at the end there were some applications to trade theory. I was very impressed by the students I taught. I was impressed by their English. They spent an enormous amount of time learning English and they spoke it without any serious accent. We sent away the interpreter, who kept interrupting us all the time. I wish we could also have sent away the representative of the communist party who was present, but she wouldn’t hear of it! She was there to vet what I had to say. This was all to get a feeling for what life was like in a Chinese university. Then everyone came to Fudan University in Shanghai. Each member of our committee, a comparable number of Chinese economists, some members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and the Vice Chancellor of Fudan University met and for a week. At the end of the week we reached an agreement. Basically, it was similar to the undergraduate program offered by the University of Tokyo. The first year they took market economics and Marxist economics. At the end of the year they had to then decide what it would be – market economics for the rest of the course or Marxist economics, as it had been for past sixty years. So then we went home having promised to send them back our lecture notes. And all those lecture notes were to be published by Fudan University Press as the first textbooks of the new curriculum, which was accepted by every university in China. The last question we debated in Fudan was who is going to teach the new curriculum. And we recommended that they take one university at a time, fill it with young doctorates coming back from North America, Europe or Australia and they could then start their own graduate programs, start providing doctorates of their own. Then move on to the second university and so on. Whatever you do, don’t sprinkle them thinly because then they’d be out voted by the Marxist economists in faculty meetings, and the new curriculum would never be taught. Well, they did it, but we weren’t to know. I waited for seven or eight years and, when nothing arrived in the mail, I wrote to the Fudan Press saying they had promised to publish the lecture notes quickly, but I hadn’t received my copy. They wrote back very apologetically, saying that the book came out on time, and it was now almost out of print. They had only two copies left which they were shipping me. When the books arrived, I opened them up and found they were in Chinese! It wasn’t for a minute or two that I discovered that if I turned them over and started from the other end, it was all English! So someone had translated and it was printed in both languages. But I enjoyed the entire experience. They were very bright students -- they’d been hand chosen, 50 of them from all over the country, and full of fun. Every night there was a dancing party or a swimming party. We all turned up at the swimming pool and we weren’t allowed in! You can’t swim in a public swimming pool in China without a doctor’s certificate dated that day or the day before. But that didn’t stop us from dancing!
(VK: Dr. Vikas Kakkar, MK: Prof. Murray Kemp)
Recent Research Outputs
A partial list of the recent output is provided below (with our staff names highlighted):
Articles in Professional Journals
Wong, Clement Y P, Anming Zhang and Jinhui Wu, “A Model of Trade in Services”, Review of International Economics, forthcoming, 2005.
Cheng, W Y, Stephen Y L Cheung and K K Po (2004), “A Note on the Intraday Patterns of Initial Public Offerings: Evidence from Hong Kong”, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, Vol. 31, Issue 5-6, pp. 837-860, June 2004.
Zhang, Yimin, A Zhang and R Zhao (2003), “A Study of the R&D Efficiency and Productivity of Chinese Firms”, Journal of Comparative Economics, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 444-464, September 2003.
Stouraitis, Aristotelis (2003), “Acquisition Premiums When Investment Banks Invest Their Own Money in the Deals They Advise and When Do Not: Evidence from Acquisitions of Assets in the UK”, Journal of Banking and Finance, Vol. 27, No. 10, pp. 1917-1934, October 2003.
Marjit, Sugata and P Raychaudhuric (2004), “Asymmetric Capacity Costs and Joint-Venture Buyouts”, Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, Vol. 54, No. 3, pp. 425-438.
Gao, Ting (2004), “China’s Foreign Direct Investment in Perspective”, Harvard China Review, Vol. 4.
Wang, Yong and A Tandon (2003), “Confidence in Domestic Money and Currency Substitution”, Economic Inquiry, Vol. 41, No. 3, pp. 407-419, July 2003.
Gao, Ting, “Foreign Direct Investment and Growth under Economic Integration”, Journal of International Economics, forthcoming.
Bandara, J S and Wusheng Yu (2003), “How Desirable Is the South Asian Free Trade Area? A Quantitative Economic Assessment”, The World Economy, Vol. 26, pp. 1293-1323, September 2003.
Grossman, Gene and Edwin L C Lai, “International Protection of Intellectual Property”, American Economic Review, forthcoming.
Chao, C C and Eden S H Yu (2003), “Jobs, Production Linkages and the Environment”, Journal of Economics, Vol. 79, No. 2, pp. 113-122.
Huang, Lixin and G Gorton (2004), “Liquidity, Efficiency and Bank Bailouts”, American Economic Review, Vol. 94, pp. 455-483, June 2004.
Wu, Shu and S Iwata, “Macroeconomic Shocks and the Foreign Exchange Risk Premia”, Macroeconomic Dynamics, forthcoming.
Ching, S, Clement Y P Wong and Anming Zhang (2004), “Non-tariff Barriers to Trade in the Pacific Rim”, Pacific Economic Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 65-73, February 2004.
Li, Kui-Wai and Tung Liu (2004), “Performance of Financial Resources in China’s Provinces”, Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 32-48.
Mak, S K M, Stephen Y L Cheung and K C Ng (2003), “Portfolio Investment: ESP Trading Strategy in Hong Kong and in Singapore”, Journal of Transnational Management Development, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 3-17.
Yu, Wusheng, T W Hertel, P V Preckel and J S Eales (2004), “Projecting World Food Demand Using Alternative Demand Systems”, Economic Modelling, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 99-129, January 2004.
Frandsen, S E, H G Jensen, Wusheng Yu and A Walter-Jørgensen (2003), “Reform of EU Sugar Policy: Price Cuts Versus Quota Reductions”, European Review of Agricultural Economics, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 1-26.
Li, Kui-Wai and Jun Ma, “The Economic Intricacies of Banking Reform in China”, The Chinese Economy, forthcoming.
Zhang, Yimin and R Zhao (2004), “The Valuation Differential between Class A and B Shares: Country Risk in the Chinese Stock Market”, Journal of International Financial Management & Accounting, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 44-59, March 2004.
Cheung, Stephen Y L, P R Rau and Aristotelis Stouraitis, “Tunneling, Propping and Expropriation Evidence from Connected Party Transactions in Hong Kong”, Journal of Financial Economics, forthcoming.
Qu, Baozhi (2004), “What Determines Corporate Ownership Concentration Around the World?”, Advances in Financial Economics, Vol. 9.
Conference Papers
Kwok, Claudian S K (2003), “Asset Pricing in an Environment with a Credit Constrained Sector”, presented in the Conference of Asian Financial Management / Taiwan Financial Management / U.S. Financial Management Association, July 2003.
Ho, T M and Mary Pang (2004), “Job Preferences and Job Attainments of Hong Kong Graduates: A Study of Accounting and Management Majors”, presented in the Global Business & Finance Research Conference, London, United Kingdom, 14-17 July 2004.
Kakkar, Vikas and Stephen Y L Cheung (2003), “Long Run Real Exchange Rate Overvaluation: Evidence from Asia”, presented in the 8th Australasian Macroeconomic Workshop, Australia, 22-23 September 2003.
Vinaimont, Tom and P Sercu (2004), “One Share, One Vote?”, presented in the 64th Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association, San Diego, United States, 3-5 January 2004.
Gao, Ting (2004), “Openness and China’s Industrial Location: An Empirical Investigation”, presented in the International Symposium on Foreign Trade, FDI and Industrial Development, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan, 27 March 2004.
Gao, Ting (2004), “Openness, Income and Growth in China”, presented in the Asia Pacific Economies: Multilateral vs Bilateral Relationships, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, PRC, 19-21 May 2004.
Ghosh, Sudeep (2004), “Optimal Learning Through Endogenous Focal Point Formation: Theory and Evidence”, presented in the International Conference on Experimental Economics and Finance, Hong Kong, 3-4 June 2004.
Lai, Edwin L C, R Riezman and Ping Wang (2004), “Outsourcing of Innovation”, presented in the Midwest International Economics Conference, IUPUI, Indiana, United States, 30 April-2 May 2004.
Wu, Xueping and Z Wang (2003), “Ownership Concentration, Asymmetric Information, and the Positive Announcement Effect of New Equity Placements”, presented in the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Financial Management Association International, Denver, United States, 8-11 October 2003.
Huang, Lixin and H Liu (2004), “Portfolio Selection with Return Predictability and Periodically Observable Predictive Variables”, presented in the 64th Annual Meeting of the American Finance Association, San Diego, United States, 3-5 January 2004.
Wang, Yong and W H Ho (2004), “Public Capital, Asymmetric Information, and Economic Growth”, presented in the Western Economic Association Annual Conference, Vancouver, Canada, June 2004.
Announcements
New Appointments
We are pleased to welcome our new faculty members.
Prof. Sugata Marjit joined the department as a Professor in November 2004. Prof. Marjit got his Ph.D. from University of Rochester. He was Reserve Bank of India Professor of Industrial Economies, CSSS, Calcutta, India before he joined the department. He has taught at Monash University, Cornell University, University of Florida and Chinese University of Hong Kong among other institutions. His research papers in the areas of international trade and technology transfer have appeared in numerous academic journals.
Dr. James J Wang joined the department as an Associate Professor in December 2004. He received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Science and Technology of China and Master's degree from New York University. He did his PhD thesis on U.S. Treasury auctions at the University of Utah. Dr. Wang previously taught at Duke University, Thunderbird’s Garvin School of International Management, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research publications cover topics in corporate finance, market microstructure, and applications of auction theory.
Dr. Sudeep Ghosh joined the department as an Assistant Professor in June 2004. He did his M.A. in Economics at Delhi School of Economics, India and received his Ph.D. in Economics at University of Iowa, USA. His research interests are in experimental and behavioral economics and game theory. He is also interested in the areas of industrial organization and law & economics.
Dr. Baozhi Qu joined the department as an Assistant Professor in August 2004. Dr. Qu received his B.A. and M.A. from the Renmin University of China and Ph.D. in Economics from University of Pittsburgh, USA. Before joining the City University of Hong Kong in 2004, he has taught at the Renmin University of China and University of Pittsburgh. His main research interests are in the areas of corporate finance, corporate governance and investment. He is also interested in Chinese economy.
Dr. Humphrey K K Tung rejoined the department as a Visiting Assistant Professor in August 2004. Dr. Tung got his PhD from the University of Toronto, Canada. He teaches courses in financial engineering for our MSc programmes.
Dr. Shu Wu joined the department as a Visiting Assistant Professor in August 2004. Dr. Wu obtained his Ph.D. degree in Economics from Stanford University. He is an assistant professor at the University of Kansas. His research interests include macroeconomics, financial economics and international finance.
Dr. Lawrence O C Khoo rejoined the department as a Visiting Fellow in August 2004. Dr. Khoo has been Research Associate of Department of Education Psychology of Chinese University of Hong Kong and worked for our Department as Assistant Professor a few years ago. His fields of specialization are macroeconomics and economic education.
Ms. Charis S F Hui joined the department as an Instructor in January 2004. Ms. Hui worked for leading international investment banks with primary focus in areas of equity syndication and distribution. Her experience in investment banking is extensive. Apart from her official syndicate duties, she was also actively involved in the origination side (ECM) of the business.
Mr. Franko T L Wong joined the department as an Instructor in August 2004. Mr. Wong got his Bachelor of Commerce from the University of British Columbia and MBA from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has considerable working experience with the banking and financial sector. Mr. Wong will teach courses in the field of finance for our undergraduate students.
Mr. Peter W S Jor joined the department as a Teaching Assistant in September 2004. Mr. Jor is our BBABE graduate and expect to complete his MPhil study in our Department soon.
Mr. Frankie M K Wu joined the department as a Teaching Assistant in August 2004. Mr. Wu got his BSc in Economics and Finance and MSc in Economics from The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology.
Promotion
Dr. Michael C S Wong was promoted to Associate Professor in January 2004. We express our congratulations to him.
Departures
Dr. Y W Han (formerly Assistant Professor), Prof. Kenneth Chan (formerly Visiting Professor), Dr. Wusheng Yu (formerly Visiting Assistant Professor), Ms. Stella M W Lam and Ms. Priscilla Y C Leung (formerly Instructors), Mr. Thomas C F Tse (formerly Demonstrator), left our department between June and August this year. We thank them for their past contributions to our department and City University of Hong Kong. We also wish them every success in their new environments.
Research Seminars
Our department organizes seminars (almost) weekly. The objective of this well-attended series is to provide a regular forum to communicate recent contributions to economics and finance by local and overseas scholars. We will announce the schedule later. Please contact Dr. Yong Wang at (852) 2788-7286 or e-mail to efywang@cityu.edu.hk for details.
