Winners of Excellent Undergraduate Paper Awards 2025-26

To foster students’ interest in economics theory and issues, the Department has been awarding up to six Excellent Undergraduate Paper Awards, four in the Senior Division, and two in the Junior Division, each year.

We received quite many paper nominations this year, and we are thankful to have our faculty members joining the panel to select the awardees –

• Prof Travis NG
• Dr Cheuk-yin HO
• Dr Wallace Mok

The best paper in microeconomics is bestowed the Best Micro Award, and the best paper in macroeconomics is bestowed the Best Macro Award. We are pleased to announce that the award recipients for 2025-26 are:

1. YEUNG, Nok  won the Excellent Undergraduate Paper Award – Best Micro Award (Senior Division) with the research paper, “Artificial Intelligence Adoption and Factor Loadings: Panel Regressions Analysis of Equity Excess Returns” (Supervisor: Prof. Siying CAO)
2. CHEUNG, Lap Tin won the Excellent Undergraduate Paper Award – Best Macro Award (Senior Division) with the research paper, “Growth, Volatility, Imperfect Implementation and Technological Mismatch” (Supervisor: Dan LYU)
3. CHEN, Qiyue won the Excellent Undergraduate Paper Award (Senior Division) with the research paper, “Can Sponge Cities Mitigate Extreme Weather? An Empirical Evidence from China’s Pilot Program” (Supervisor: Prof. Siying CAO)

4. LU, Yumeng won the Excellent Undergraduate Paper Award (Senior Division) with the research paper, “The Double-Edged Sword of Land Finance: How Land Value Buffers Political Uncertainty in China’s LGFV Bond Market” (Supervisor: Prof. Mark HUP)

5. AN, Ran, CHENG, Wing Chi, HO, Cheuk Ka and WONG, Man Ching won the Excellent Undergraduate Paper Award (first prize in the Junior Division) for their project, “Coordination Game or Prisoner’s Dilemma? Evidence from China’s E-commerce Service Competition” (Supervisor: Ms Priscilla LEUNG)
6. CAO, Jiwei, FANG, Yun, WORKINEH, Dawitsamuel Habtamu and ZHU, Tiankai won the Excellent Undergraduate Paper Award (First Runner-up in the Junior Division) for their project, “The Nonmonotonic Impact of Generative AI on UK Job Vacancies: Evidence from the ChatGPT Shock” (Supervisor: Prof. Guangyu PEI)

As a token of appreciation, our Department will present a certificate and an e-gift card to the awardees. Once again, congratulations to all the awardees, and special thanks to the kind support of our faculty members for reviewing the papers.