Ka-fu Wong

Academic & Professional Qualification

• Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison
• MPhil., Chinese University of Hong Kong
• B.Soc.Sc., Chinese University of Hong Kong

Biography

Dr. Ka-fu WONG received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997 and immediately returned to Hong Kong. He had taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong for five years before he joined the Faculty of Business and Economics at The University of Hong Kong in 2002.

Ka-fu emphasizes his role as a teacher in his career because he had benefited greatly from three excellent teachers during his student years. Mr. Shing-sun LI during his secondary school years at the Kowloon Lutheran Middle School; Professor Man-lui LAU during his undergraduate and M.Phil. years at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; and Professor Kenneth WEST during his PhD years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ka-fu has been active in the development of economics teaching in both secondary school and university levels. In 1998 he initiated a Cyber Economic Teacher project. In 1999 he got a Teaching Development Grant (1.8 million HK dollars funded by the Hong Kong University Grants Committee) for the subject of International Economics at the university level. In the summer of 2001, he taught junior secondary students (aged 12 to 15) in the Gifted and Talented Summer Program. In the program, he used classroom experiments as a major teaching tool and received high praises from his students. In September 2001 he got a grant from the Hong Kong University Grants Committee to develop classroom experiments for secondary schools in Hong Kong (0.51 millions). The aim was to enhance the teaching and learning of Economics through classroom experiments.

Ka-fu has a wide range of research interests. He has published articles on applied econometrics and empirical macroeconomics. His current research projects are in the area of econometrics, international economics, real estate economics, and labor economics.

Research Interest

• Applied Econometrics
• Economic Forecasting

Selected Publications

• “Democracy and Accession to GATT/WTO,”
• Review of Development Economics, 19(4): 843–859 (November 2015, jointly with Miaojie Yu, Peking University)
• “A Factor Model for Co-Movements of Commodity Prices,”
• Journal of International Money and Finance, 42: 289-309 (April 2014, jointly with Kenneth D. West, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
• “Economic Impact of Political Barriers to Cross-Border Acquisitions: An Empirical Study of CNOOC’s Unsuccessful Takeover of Unocal,”
• Journal of Corporate Finance, 15:4, 447-468 (September 2009, jointly with Kam-Ming Wan of the University of Texas at Dallas)
• “Instrumental variables estimation of heteroskedastic linear models using all lags of instruments,”
• Econometric Reviews, 28:5, 441-467 (September 2009, jointly with Kenneth D. West, University of Wisconsin, and Stanislav Anatolyev, New Economic School at Moscow, also appeared as NBER Working Paper #13134, and NBER Technical Working Paper #338.)
• “The importance of migration flow to Hong Kong’s future,”
• in Hong Kong Mobile – Making a Global Population, edited by Helen F. Siu and Agnes S. Ku, Hong Kong University Press, 2008 (jointly with Richard Y.C. Wong, University of Hong Kong)
• “Explaining the duration of exchange-rate pegs in Asia,”
• International Journal of Applied Economics, 2 (2), 119-129. (September 2005, jointly with Sze-Wan Leung of Pangs Department Store Limited)
• “Do Dragons have better fate?”
• Economic Inquiry, 43 (3), 689-697. (July 2005, jointly with Linda Yung, Chinese University of Hong Kong)
• “Testing Fisher Hypothesis in long horizons for G7 and eight Asian countries,”
• Applied Economics Letters, 10 (14), 917-923. (November 2003, jointly with Haijun Wu).
• “Variability in the Effects of Monetary Policy on Economic Activity,”
• Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 32 (2), 179-199 (May 2000).
• “Effects on Inference of Pretesting the Exogeneity of a Regressor,”
• Economics Letters, 56 (3), 267-271 (November 1997).
• “Bootstrapping Hausman’s Exogeneity Test,”
• Economics Letters, 53 (2), 139-143 (November 1996).
• “Educational Choice of Secondary School Graduates in Hong Kong,”
• Education Journal, 20 (2), 95-100 (December 1992, jointly with Hang-yue Ngo and Y.P. Chung).
• “Private and Social Rates of Return to Education in Hong Kong,”
• in The Economics and Financing of Education in Hong Kong edited by Y.C. Wong and Y.P. Chung, Chinese University Press, 1991.

Awards and Honours

• Outstanding Teaching Award (Undergraduate Teaching), Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong, 2008 – 2009
• Teaching Award for the Taught Postgraduate Programmes, Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong, 2004 – 2005

Service to the University/Community

• Undergraduate Programme Director, School of Economics and Finance, HKU, 2013 – 2015
• Assistant Dean (Admissions), Faculty of Business and Economics, HKU, 2011 – 2013