HE Guojun is an economist working on environmental, development, and governance issues. Currently, he is a professor in Economics and Management & Strategy at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He serves as the director of HKU’s ESG Research Institute and the associate director of HKU’s Institute of China Economy. He holds a concurrent appointment at the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago (EPIC) and leads research activities of its China center (EPIC-China). He is a co-editor of Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and China Economic Review.
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 a broader research interest in development and governance issues. His work has been published in leading economics journals (like QJE, AER, AER: Insights, AEJ: Applied) and science journals (like Science, PNAS, Nature: Sustainability, Nature Human Bahaviour, and The BMJ).
He has won multiple academic awards, including the Zhang Pei-Gang Award for Outstanding Achievement in Development Economics (the highest award in China for development economics research) and the Gregory Chow Best Paper Award from the Chinese Economists Society. He was selected as a Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum in 2018.
He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Agricultural and Resource Economics from U.C. Berkeley and received undergraduate education from the School of Economics at Peking University. Before joining HKU, he worked at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Harvard University. In addition, He is a Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER), an external research affiliate of the Institute of Sustainable and Green Finance (SGFIN) at the National University of Singapore, a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, and a consultant to the Asian Development Bank, CICC Research Institute and other institutions.
