Kwok Yuen Fan

About Me

I am Kwok Yuen (K.Y.) Fan, an Assistant Professor of Economics and Finance at The Hang Seng University of Hong Kong (HSUHK).

My research operates at the intersection of two distinct worlds. My academic journey began in Marketing, studying how organizations craft narratives and sell visions of the future. However, as my path led me to the United Kingdom for a Master’s in Finance, I began to perceive a friction between the stories companies tell and the ledger sheets they manage. Surrounded by the rigorous logic of capital markets, I identified a fundamental tension: while Marketing focuses on perceived value, Finance demands shareholder value.

But what about social value?

This question brought me back to the skylines I grew up admiring. While witnessing awe-inspiring urbanization, I could not ignore the negative externalities left in the wake of progress. I recognized a profound economic injustice: profits were often privatized on corporate balance sheets, while environmental costs were socialized for the public to bear. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the Real Estate sector — a primary engine of the global economy, yet also a massive contributor to global emissions and waste.

Resolving this dissonance is the core mission of my work.

I pivoted to academia to reconcile my Marketing roots (the promise of a better world) with my Finance training (the constraints of capital). Today, I use Corporate Finance as a lens to examine how firms balance economic gains with social welfare. I dig into the data to determine how we can redesign financial incentives so that the real estate sector accounts for its externalities — transforming environmental justice from a marketing slogan into a financial reality.

Increasingly, my workflow and research questions are shaped by the rise of AI. I use frontier LLMs as daily infrastructure for reading, coding, and exploring data, and I bring this computational lens to the problems I care about: how AI reshapes economic incentives, how it redistributes risk and returns, and whether it helps or hinders the green transition. I want to work at the boundary where models meet real economic decisions — because that is where both the intellectual frontier and the practical impact lie.

Research Interests

My research focuses on three interconnected areas:

1. Sustainability

Climate change, Biodiversity, Greenwashing, AI and the green transition

2. Real Estate

Climate resilience, Green buildings, Land

3. Corporate Finance

Fintech, Blended Finance, Political Economy, AI and financial markets