Winston (Wei) Dou’s research focus lies at the intersection of finance, macroeconomics, and econometrics, in particular the impact of economic uncertainty, the role of market imperfection and incompleteness, the interactions of international asset prices and capital flows and their roles in understanding global imbalances, and new econometric methods for analyzing structural models. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Finance, the Annals of Statistics, and the Journal of American Statistics Association. His research has received multiple academic awards, and he also received a teaching excellence award at the Wharton School.
One of his recent research projects quantitatively and empirically investigates how heightened economic uncertainty affects asset prices and investment. Intuitively speaking, economic uncertainty is the blurriness or randomness of firm-specific economic prospects. Interestingly, he finds that, in the model as in the data, uncertainty is not always fearfully evil as the economy has experienced around the late 2000s financial crisis; in fact, it can sometimes be welcomed and embraced by investors.
He joined Wharton in 2016 as an assistant professor of finance. Previously, he studied financial economics at MIT. He also received another doctoral degree in statistics from Yale University in 2010. He obtained a BS in mathematics and another BS in economics from Peking University in China.
