Prof. Michael B. Wong is an assistant professor in management and strategy with a joint appointment in economics at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He received his PhD from MIT in 2022 and his BA from Harvard University in 2012.
Michael is an applied microeconomist. His research focuses on labor economics, housing economics, organizational economics, and monetary economics. His work combines a wide range of methodological approaches, including the use of administrative data, field experiments, rigorous causal inference, parsimonious models, and structural estimation methods.
His academic contributions have covered topics such as the impact of domestic outsourcing on workers and labor markets in Brazil, as well as the impact of public housing and rent regulation in Hong Kong. He studied the implementation and design of digital currencies by collecting and analyzing detailed transaction-level data on money and barter in the field. He also developed tractable general equilibrium models of exchange economies with centralized managerial resource allocation.
In addition to academic research, Michael is an active contributor of policy research on Hong Kong. He is the research director of local policy research think tank Hong Kong Future Economy Institute. He is also a Fellow of the HKU Centre on Contemporary China and the World, an a iliate researcher of the HKU Jockey Club ESG Research Institute, and a member of the HKU Real Estate Lab. His policy writings have been featured in the SCMP, Ming Pao, HKET, HKEJ, HK01, and the HKU Policy Green Paper series.
Prior to pursuing his PhD, he worked as a Research Professional at the University of Chicago and as a business consultant in San Francisco.
