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Wing Suen
Chair of Economics
Henry G Leong Professor in Economics
Office:KK 1014
Tel:2857-8505
Email:
Website:http://www.sef.hku.hk/~wsuen
bulletBIOGRAPHY
Wing Suen was educated at the University of Hong Kong. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Washington. After doing post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago, he returned to his alma mater in 1989 and is now Chair of Economics at the School of Economics and Finance. He had also held research or teaching positions at Simon Fraser University, Harvard University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

 

Wing's research interests center around applied microeconomic theory. He has done some work on efficiency and early contracting in two-sided matching markets. One of his current research areas looks at the transmission of information across individuals with divergent beliefs and motives. An application that is close to the heart of the academician is the issue of grade inflation in higher education. He argues that the college professor, in playing the dual role of advocate and judge for his students, is trapped into an inefficient equilibrium in which grades are too high.

 

Another example of this line of work explores the structure of social networks. Individuals with opposing viewpoints tend to believe that the other party is uninformed or misinformed. If people form social ties in order to obtain more information, they will rationally choose to be associated with like-minded peers. Will there be an equilibrium in which people with different viewpoints are segregated from one another? What are the consequences of this group formation process for the evolution of social beliefs?

 

Wing also maintains an interest in the labor market of Hong Kong. He is an associate editor of the Pacific Economic Review and is program leader of the Human Resources Research Program of the Hong Kong Institute of Economics and Business Strategy. His current work in this area focuses on the effects of public housing on internal migration, travel-to-work patterns, and labor supply decisions.

 

PUBLICATIONSbullet
  • Labour Market in a Dynamic Economy
    (with William Chan), Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 1997, also published in Chinese by the Commercial Press, Hong Kong, 1997.
  • The Structure of Economics: A Mathematical Analysis, 3rd. ed.
    (with Eugene Silberberg), New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001, translated into Chinese by the Tsinghua University Press, Beijing, 2003.
  • "Decomposing Wage Residuals: Unmeasured Skill or Statistical Artifact?,"
    Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 15, Part 1, July 1997, pp.555-566.
  • "A Competitive Theory of Equilibrium and Disequilibrium Unraveling in Two-Sided Matching,"
    RAND Journal of Economics, Vol. 31, Spring 2000, pp.101-120.
  • "Conflicts and Common Interests in Committees,"
    (with Li Hao and Sherwin Rosen), American Economic Review, Vol. 91, December 2001, pp.1478-1497.
  • "The Self-Perpetuation of Biased Beliefs,"
    Economic Journal, Vol. 114, April 2005, pp.377-396.