Welcome Assistant Professor, Steve Wu
Steve Wu joined the Department of Economics in July 2021. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in June 2020, and spent 2020-21 as a Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia. His main areas of research are macroeconomics and international finance.
Steve’s research covers important areas of open economy macroeconomics. One branch of his agenda sheds light on the corporate-sovereign nexus in emerging countries. Empirically, he finds that higher levels of corporate dollar debt increase the risk premium but not the default premium on sovereign debt. He provides an economic explanation for these puzzling findings by building the role of the dollar as a safe currency into a quantitative model of a small open economy with defaultable corporate debt and defaultable sovereign debt. Other work addresses exchange rate dynamics, proposing a new mechanism of exchange rate determination through the liquidity yield of government securities such as the US Treasury.
Steve extends our macroeconomics group here at UCSD Economics by adding coverage of international finance. He will teach intermediate macro at the undergraduate level, and will teach in the macro core and a course in international macroeconomics at the graduate level.