People

Professor Keith K.P. WONG received his Ph.D. in Finance from the University of British Columbia in 1993.  He also holds a B.Soc.Sc. in Economics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a M.A. in Economics from the University of Western Ontario.  After teaching at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology for three years, Keith joined the School of Economics and Finance at The University of Hong Kong in 1996, and was promoted to Professor of Finance in 2006.  In March 2012, Keith took up the School’s Directorship.

Keith’s research is mainly theoretical and can be divided into three areas: corporate finance, risk management, and real options.  Beginning with his Ph.D. dissertation, Keith’s research on corporate finance focuses on integrating financial contract theory with industrial organization theories.  Since 1998, Keith has done research on risk management that examines the issues of how risk-averse firms should hedge their exposure to various sources of uncertainty (e.g., exchange rate risk, price risk, and liquidity risk) in general, and the optimality of using options as a hedging instrument in particular.  Firms’ preferences towards risk, regret, and ambiguity, as well as state-dependent preferences are studied. 

Keith started his research on real options in 2004 with the paper entitled “The Effect of Uncertainty on Investment Timing in a Real Options Model,” published in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.  This paper points out that the investment-uncertainty relationship is necessarily U-shaped unless the underlying uncertainty is purely idiosyncratic in nature, as is commonly considered in the extant literature.  He also studies a firm’s capital structure and capital budgeting decisions using the real options approach.