Zhiguo He, an associate professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has been named a 2014 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow.
Awarded to promising early-career scientists in science, mathematics, economics and computer science, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awards two-year fellowships of $50,000 to support original research.
“I feel honored to be nominated as a 2014 Sloan Research Fellow in Economics,” He said. “More importantly, I am excited that my work gets recognized, because getting this prestigious award means that my colleagues are thinking that I am making important contributions to the field.”
In his application, He focused on “A Macroeconomic Framework for Quantifying Systemic Risk,” written with Arvind Krishnamurthy, of the Kellogg School, and “Endogenous Liquidity and Defaultable Bonds,” written with Konstantin Milbradt, of the Kellogg School, which is now forthcoming in Econometrica.
Overall, He’s research dials in on how agency frictions affect the functioning of financial markets, with a special focus on contract theory. Working on the burgeoning field of macrofinance, He has helped introduce financial intermediation into the macroeconomic workhorse models. His recent research on “rollover risk” studies the debt maturity structure and its implications on the recent financial crisis.
The Lehman Brothers collapse and seeing “the malfunctioning of various financial markets” sparked He’s interest. “I think the 2007-08 financial crises have taught us a lot on how to think about the world, and I am trying to bring these forces into our understanding of economic mechanisms,” he says.