Council of Advisers for Applied Research

Mr Henri ARSLANIAN

Co-founder and Managing Partner, Nine Blocks Capital Management
Adjunct Associate Professor, Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong

Henri Arslanian is the co-founder and managing partner of Nine Blocks Capital Management, an institutional-grade hedge fund focused exclusively on digital assets, with a market-neutral crypto fund focused on generating alpha from inefficiencies in crypto markets using relative value, arbitrage, and quantitative strategies.

Henri was previously a partner and global crypto leader at PwC. In that role, he advised many of the world’s leading crypto exchanges, investors, financial institutions, and tech firms on their crypto initiatives, as well as numerous governments, regulators, and central banks on crypto regulatory and policy matters. 

With over 500,000 LinkedIn followers, Henri is a TEDx and global keynote speaker, a best-selling published author, and is regularly featured in global media, including Bloomberg, CNBC, CNN, BBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and the Financial Times. 

Henri was named by LinkedIn as one of the 2022 global Top Voices in Finance and is the host of the CryptoCapsules™ social media video series as well as The Future of Money podcast and newsletter.

Henri was named by Onalytica as the #1 most influential individual on Finance globally on LinkedIn out of 50k+ individuals working at the top professional services and management consulting firms in the world. 

Chambers Global named Henri the “highest profile FinTech consultant in Hong Kong,” Blockchain Asset Review named him the “Most Influential Crypto and Blockchain Thought Leader in Asia,” and Asian Private Banker awarded him the “FinTech Changemaker of the Year” award.

Henri is the author of numerous best-selling crypto and fintech-related books, including “The Book of Crypto” (Palgrave, 2022), which became a global top 10 best-seller in financial services, and “The Future of Finance” (Palgrave 2019, Palgrave), which became not only a global top 10 best-seller in financial services but was also recognized as one of the “Best FinTech Books of All Time” by Bookauthority.

Henri was elected as the first Chairman of the FinTech Association of Hong Kong. He is also an appointed member of Hong Kong securities regulator SFC FinTech Advisory Group, the Hong Kong central bank's Institute for Monetary and Financial Research council of advisers, and the Dubai DIFC innovation panel. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Hong Kong, where he teaches the first FinTech university course globally. 

Henri started his career as a financial markets and funds lawyer in Canada and Hong Kong before joining UBS Investment Bank’s prime brokerage capital consulting team. 

Henri speaks five languages, including English, French, Armenian, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese.

He holds a Master’s in Chinese Law from Tsinghua University; a joint Global Executive MBA from Columbia Business School, London Business School, and Hong Kong University; a Bachelor of Law from the University of Montreal (Dean’s List of Excellence), and a Master’s in Transnational Law from the University of Sherbrooke, where he was awarded the Governor General of Canada Gold Medal for Academic Excellence for having graduated with the highest grades of the university.

Professor Franklin ALLEN

Professor of Finance and Economics 
Vice-Dean (Research and Faculty) 
Business School 
Director 
Brevan Howard Centre 
Imperial College London


Franklin Allen is Professor of Finance and Economics and Director of the Brevan Howard Centre at Imperial College London and has held these positions since July 2014.  In August 2019 he became the Associate Dean for Faculty and Research in the Business School and in August 2020 the Vice-Dean (Research & Faculty) there.  He was on the faculty of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania from September 1980 – June 2016. He now has Emeritus status there. He was formerly Vice Dean and Director of Wharton Doctoral Programs, Co-Director of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center, Executive Editor of the Review of Financial Studies and Managing Editor of the Review of Finance.  He is a past President of the American Finance Association, the Western Finance Association, the Society for Financial Studies, the Financial Intermediation Research Society and the Financial Management Association, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the British Academy.  He received his doctorate from Oxford University.  Dr. Allen's main areas of interest are corporate finance, asset pricing, financial innovation, comparative financial systems, and financial crises.  He is a co-author with Richard Brealey and Stewart Myers of the eighth through thirteenth editions and also with Alex Edmans of the fourteenth edition of the textbook Principles of Corporate Finance.

Professor Beatrice WEDER DI MAURO

President
Centre for Economic Policy Research
Professor, International Economics
Faculty Associate, Centre for Finance and Development


Beatrice Weder di Mauro is the President of CEPR, the leading European network of economists, Professor of International Economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute  and Research Professor at INSEAD.  From 2001 to 2018 she held the Chair for International Macroeconomics at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. From 2004 to 2012 she was a member on the German Council of Economic Experts. Previously she had worked at the University of Basel and the International Monetary Fund and has held visiting positions at Harvard University, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the United Nations University in Tokyo. 

She has served as consultant to governments, international organizations and central banks (European Commission, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Central Bank, Deutsche Bundesbank, OECD, among others).  She is presently independent director on the board of Unigestion and Bosch and senior research fellow at the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research (ABFER) in Singapore, and a member of the Bellagio Group. 

Her research interests are in international macroeconomics. She has published widely in leading academic journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of International Economics, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Development Economics and Review of Finance. She writes regular op-eds and contributions to the public policy debate.

Professor Tarun CHORDIA

R. Howard Dobbs, Jr. Chair and Professor in Finance
Goizueta Business School
Emory University

Professor Tarun Chordia received his PhD in finance from the Anderson School, UCLA, in 1993. Prior to his doctoral studies, he worked for Citibank as a relationship and credit manager in the Financial Institutions Group. He has been an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University from 1993 to 2000. He joined the Goizueta Business School at Emory University in 2000.

Professor Chordia’s research is grounded in both theory and empirical methods, and spans a diverse area of financial economics. Professor Chordia has published extensively in the top finance journals, including Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Business, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Management Science. He has received numerous awards for his research on empirical asset pricing and market microstructure.  He is currently the managing editor of the Journal of Financial Markets and a past associate editor of Review of Financial Studies. He has been on the program committee for the American Finance Association meetings, European Finance Association meetings, FIRS Conference, Finance Down Under Conference, NBER Market Microstructure group, the SFS Calvacade Asia, Stern Microstructure Conference, the Utah Winter Finance Conference and the Western Finance Association meetings, and is a referee for numerous journals.

Dr Dong HE

Deputy Director, Monetary and Capital Markets Department
International Monetary Fund

Dong HE is Deputy Director of the Monetary and Capital Markets Department (MCM) of the International Monetary Fund. He has been leading the IMF’s work on central banking, global financial stability analysis, monetary and macroprudential policies, fintech and digital currencies. He started his career in 1993 when he joined the World Bank through the Young Professionals Program and was a staff member of the IMF during 1998-2004. Prior to re-joining the IMF in October 2014, he was Executive Director at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, responsible for managing the Research Department and for directing research and policy advice on issues relating to the maintenance of monetary and financial stability and the development of financial markets. He was also Director of the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research, responsible for leading the Institute’s research activities.

Dong HE holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Cambridge. He has published extensively on macroeconomic and financial market issues. His current research interests include the interactions between monetary policy and financial regulation, digitization and central banking, monetary and financial cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region, the framework and conduct of monetary and financial stability policies in China, and the Chinese approach to capital account liberalization and renminbi internationalization.

Professor Lars Peter HANSEN

Nobel Laureate in Economics, 2013
Professor in Finance, David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor and Professor in Statistics
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Lars Peter Hansen is a leading expert in economic dynamics who works at the forefront of economic thinking and modeling, drawing approaches from macroeconomics, finance, and statistics. He is a recipient of the 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Hansen has made fundamental advances in our understanding of how economic agents cope with changing and risky environments. He has contributed to the development of statistical methods designed to explore the interconnections between macroeconomic indicators and assets in financial markets. These methods are widely used in empirical research in financial economics today.

The Nobel Prize recognizes this work, which has been used to test theories and models that have shaped our modern understanding of asset pricing.  His recent research explores how to quantify intertemporal risk-return tradeoffs and ways to model economic behavior when consumers and investors struggle with uncertainty about the future. Improving models that measure risk and uncertainty have important implications for financial markets, fiscal policy, and the macroeconomy.

His early research in econometrics was aimed at developing time series statistical methods to investigate one part of an economic model without having to fully specify and estimate all of the model ingredients. The applications he explored with several coauthors, such as Kenneth J. Singleton, Scott F. Richard, Robert Hodrick, and Ravi Jagannathan, included systems that are rich enough to support models of asset valuation and to identify and clarify empirical puzzles, where real-world financial and economic data were at odds with prevailing academic models.

Hansen’s recent work focuses on uncertainty and its relationship to long run risks in the macroeconomy. He explores how models that incorporate ambiguities, beliefs, and skepticism of consumers and investors can explain economic and financial data and reveal the long-term consequences of policy options. Hansen, Thomas J. Sargent, and their coauthors have recently developed methods for modeling economic decision-making in environments in which uncertainty is hard to quantify.  They explore the consequences for models with financial markets and characterize environments in which the beliefs of economic actors are fragile.

Hansen joined the faculty of the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics in 1981 and has served as department chairman and director of graduate studies. He is now David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, Statistics, Booth School of Business and the College. He was the inaugural director of the Becker Friedman Institute until July of 2017.  Read Lars’ personal reflection on the beginnings of the Becker Friedman Institute here. He currently directs the Macro Finance Research Program housed under the Becker Friedman Institute. 

Hansen also serves as co-principal investigator, along with Andrew Lo of MIT, on the Macro Financial Modeling Project (MFM). This research group works to develop macroeconomic models with enhanced linkages to financial markets, with the aim of providing better policy tools for monitoring so-called systemic risks to the economy.

In addition to the Nobel prize, Hansen has also received many other awards and honors. Hansen won the 2010 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Economics, Finance and Management “for making fundamental contributions to our understanding of how economic actors cope with risky and changing environments.” He also received the CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications in 2008 and the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics from Northwestern University in 2006. In 1984, he and Kenneth J. Singleton were awarded the Frisch Medal from the Econometric Society for their paper, “Generalized Instrumental Variables Estimation of Nonlinear Rational Expectations Models.”

Hansen is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Finance Association. He also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and past president of the Econometric Society.

He has delivered numerous lectures around the world. In 2016, he presented the CORE Nobel Talk at the Université catholique de Louvain, and in 2015 he presented the LAUNCH Distinguished Lecture at the University of Illinois and the W.P. Carey Lecture at Colorado College. He was the 2014 lecturer at the IGIER Seminar Series at  Università Bocconi and lectured at the 1st Macro Finance Workshop of the Macro Finance Society at Ohio State University. Hansen gave the Princeton Lectures in Finance at the Bendheim Center for Finance in December 2010, the Tjalling C. Koopmans Memorial Lectures at Yale in September 2008, and the Third Toulouse Lectures in Economics at the Université de Toulouse in May 2005.

Hansen holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and political science from Utah State University and a doctorate in economics from the University of Minnesota.  Hansen has also received numerous honorary degrees, including an honorary doctorate from Utah State University in 2012.

Professor Zhiguo HE

Fuji Bank and Heller Professor of Finance
Co-Director of Fama-Miller Center
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Professor Zhiguo He serves as the Fuji Bank and Heller Professor of Finance, PhD Program area adviser, and Faculty Co-Director of Fama-Miller Center at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business. Professor Zhiguo He is also a Research Associate at NBER, and was the Dean’s Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, Graduate School of Business. Professor Zhiguo He also serves as the Special-term Alibaba Foundation Professor at Tsinghua University, School of Economics and Management, and the member of Academic Committee of Luohan Academy.

Professor He is interested in the implications of agency frictions and debt maturities in financial markets and macroeconomics, with a special focus on contract theory and banking. His research focuses on the role of financial institutions in the 2007/08 global financial crisis, and has been published in leading academic journals including American Economic Review, Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, and Journal of Financial Economics, Management Science, and he has been and is serving as Associate Editor for both Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, and Management Science.

Professor He is teaching an MBA course on “Chinese Economy and Financial Market.” He is also conducting active academic research on Chinese financial markets that are undergoing rapid development these days, including stock market, local government debt, shadow banking, interbank markets, together with recent regulatory changes. Besides research in Chinese financial market, Professor He is also writing academic articles on new progresses in the area of FinTech, especially the Blockchain technology and its potential business applications. 

Professor He received his bachelor and master degrees from Tsinghua University in Beijing, before he obtained his PhD from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2008. He has been named a 2014 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and has won numerous awards for his outstanding scholastic record, including Lehman Brothers Fellowship for Research Excellence in Finance in 2007, the Swiss Finance Institute Outstanding Paper Award in 2012, the Smith-Breeden First Prize in 2012 and the Brattle Group First Prize in 2014. Before joining the Chicago Booth faculty in 2008, he worked as a stock analyst at the China International Capital Corporation in Beijing in 2001, and was visiting the Bendheim Center for Finance at Princeton University as a post-doc fellow.

Professor Sophie MOINAS

Professor of Finance
IAE Toulouse School of Management
and Toulouse School of Economics

Professor John ROGERS

Professor of Economics
Fanhai International School of Finance


John Rogers, Professor of Economics at Fanhai International School of Finance in Fudan University.

Professor Rogers worked in the International Finance Division of the Federal Reserve Board for 27 years. Before joining FISF, he was a Senior Adviser in the International Finance Division of the Federal Reserve Board, and a Tenured Associate Professor at Penn State University.

Professor Rogers' research focuses on empirical monetary economics, international finance, and macroeconomics. His research interests comprise six broad, and somewhat overlapping, themes: Border Effects; Economic Spillovers Across Countries; Monetary Policy; Exchange Rates; Current Accounts and Uncertainty; and Relations Between the US and China. His research has appeared in leading academic journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Monetary Economics, and Review of Economics and Statistics.

Professor Rogers has taught graduate and undergraduate courses at several universities, including University of Virginia (as a PhD student), University of Kentucky, Penn State, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown University, Fudan University, and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

Professor Rogers earned his PhD degree in Economics from University of Virginia in 1989 and his Bachelor degree from the University of Delaware.

Ms Sarah WILLIAMSON

Chief Executive Officer
FCLTGlobal

Focusing Capital on the Long Term (“FCLTGlobal”) is a 501c3 not-for-profit organization whose goal is to rebalance capital markets towards effective long-term capital allocation for sustainable growth.

We work in partnership with over 50 member institutions, who are highly-respected global organizations across the investment value chain: asset owners, asset managers, and companies. Together we develop practical tools and resources that encourage longer-term behaviors in business and investment decision-making for economic growth and future savings. We have a team with deep experience in investing, consulting and business based in Boston.

Sarah Keohane Williamson is the Chief Executive Officer of FCLTGlobal. In this role, she leads our efforts at conducting innovative, practical research, engaging with our global membership, sharing our perspectives and research with constituents globally, and building our team.

Williamson assumed her current role in July 2016, after spending over 21 years at Wellington Management in Boston and San Francisco, most recently as a Partner and Director of Alternative Investments. Prior to joining Wellington Management, Williamson spent over five years with McKinsey & Company Inc. in London, Dallas and Boston. She was also a special assistant at the US Department of State and was a mergers & acquisitions investment banker in New York and London for Goldman, Sachs & Co.

In her FCLTGlobal capacity, Williamson is a co-chair of the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Long-term Investing, a member of the Advisory Board for the Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership at Columbia, and a member of the Hong Kong Institute for Monetary and Financial Research Council of Advisers.

Williamson also serves as a Director of Evercore (NYSE:EVR) and is a member of the Harvard Business School Board of Dean’s Advisors, the Boston Children’s Hospital investment committee and the board of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

She earned her MBA, with distinction, from Harvard Business School and her BA in Economics, with honors, from Williams College. She holds the Chartered Financial Analyst and the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst designations. She is a US citizen and is married with three grown children.

For more information, please visit www.fcltglobal.org or email [email protected].