NUS RMI Conference on Quantitative Economics and Finance: In Honour of Professor Thomas J. Sargent
We are honored to announce that Professor Thomas J. Sargent, William R. Berkley Professor of Economics and Business, New York University and a Nobel Laureate will be visiting RMI from 11-15 August 2025. In honour of his visit we will be hosting a conference on Thursday, 14 August 2025.
Guest of Honor
Thomas J. SARGENT
Professor of Economics, New York University
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA
Nobel Laureate
Prof. Thomas J. Sargent
Professor of Economics, New York University
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA
Nobel Laureate
Thomas J. Sargent, a macroeconomist, joined New York University as the first W.R. Berkley Professor in September 2002, a joint appointment by the Economics Department at NYU's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Stern School of Business. He was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics, shared with Princeton University's Christopher Sims, for his empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy.
Professor Sargent was a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota from 1975 to 1987, the David Rockefeller Professor at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 1998 and the Donald Lucas Professor of Economics at Stanford University from 1998 to 2002. He has been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1987.
Professor Sargent earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1968 and was a first lieutenant and captain in the U.S. Army. He was a university medalist as Most Distinguished Scholar in the Class of 1964 and won the Nemmers Prize in Economics in 1997. Professor Sargent was elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, both in 1983.
Professor Sargent is past president of the Econometric Society, the American Economic Association and the Society for Economic Dynamics.
Among his books are Rational Expectations and Econometric Practice, with Robert E. Lucas Jr., University of Minnesota Press, 1981; The Big Problem of Small Change, with Francois Velde, Princeton University Press, 2002; Recursive Macroeconomic Theory, with Lars Ljungqvist, MIT Press, 2004; and Robustness, with Lars Peter Hansen, Princeton University Press, 2008.
Conference Speakers
Neng WANG
Dean's Distinguished Chair Professor of Finance and Senior Associate Dean, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business
Visiting Professor, NUS Risk Management Institute
Prof. Neng Wang
Dean's Distinguished Chair Professor of Finance and Senior Associate Dean, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business
Visiting Professor, NUS Risk Management Institute
Neng Wang is Dean’s Distinguished Chair Professor of Finance and Senior Associate Dean at CKGSB. Prior to joining CKGSB, he was Chong Khoon Lin Professor of Real Estate and Finance at Columbia Business School since 2007. He is also a Research Associate (Senior Research Fellow) at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Senior Research Fellow at Asian Bureau of Financial and Economics Research (ABFER). He has widely published in leading economics, finance, and business journals. Among other awards and honors, he won a Smith-Breeden Distinguished Paper Prize awarded by the Journal of Finance, and the Bettis Distinguished Scholar Award from Carey School of Business, Arizona State University.
His research interests include corporate finance, contract theory, financial institutions, asset pricing, asset allocation, sovereign debt and international finance, risk management, entrepreneurial finance, household finance, wealth distribution, macroeconomics, private equity, hedge funds, investor protection, real estate finance, FinTech, and the Chinese economy. He has taught courses at both MBA and PhD levels including advanced asset pricing theory, advanced corporate finance, entrepreneurial finance and private equity, fixed income securities and markets, financial institutions, risk management, real estate finance, corporate finance theory, and continuous-time finance.
He received B.S. in Physical Chemistry from Nanjing University, China in 1992, M.S. in Chemistry from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1995, M.A. in International Relations from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in 1997, and Ph.D. in Finance from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University in 2002. He was born in 1973 in Anhui, China.
Karsten MUELLER
Asst Prof. Karsten Mueller
Karsten Müller is an Assistant Professor in Finance at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School.
His research focuses on finance, macroeconomics and political economy. One line of his work studies how politics and financial regulation determine which firms and households get access to credit in the economy and what the macroeconomic consequences may be. His second stream of research shows that social media can affect election outcomes and anti-minority sentiments offline. Karsten's work has been widely cited by media outlets such as The New York Times, The Economist, Financial Times, Time Magazine, Bloomberg, Huffington Post, CNN, The Guardian, and many others.
Before joining NUS, Karsten was a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He earned his Ph.D. in Business and Management from the University of Warwick in 2018.
Yifan FENG
Asst Prof. Yifan FENG
Assistant Professor
Analytics And Operations
Yifan Feng is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Analytics and Operations (DAO) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School. He is also affiliated with the Institute of Operations Research and Analytics (IORA) and Artificial Intelligence Institute at NUS.
He primarily work on learning, experimentation, and information acquisition, as well as their applications to platforms and markets. He also takes a problem-driven approach to studying other aspects of platform operations, such as demand fulfillment.
Here is a link to his personal website.
Kohei TAKEDA
Assistant Professor
Department of Economics
Kohei TAKEDA
Assistant Professor Department of Economics, NUS
I study various topics in trade and urban economics. My research explores the redistributive effects of economic policies and shocks across space and time, and therefore, my research interests extend to the intersection of international trade, economic geography, and labour economics.
Jingyi LIANG
PhD Student, department of Economics, NUS
Registration
Admission is free but all participants must be registered for the conference. As seats are limited the confirmation will be sent on first come first serve basis.
For enquiries, please contact Shi Zican at zican.s@nus.edu.sg