Prof. Albert Park received his PhD from Stanford University in 1996. He was previously Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Michigan, and Professor in the Economy of China, Department of Economics and School for Interdisciplinary Area Studies in University of Oxford. He joined the HKUST in 2011 and is currently a Chair Professor of Social Science, of Economics and of Public Policy. He was also the Director of HKUST Institute for Emerging Market Studies.

Prof. Park’s research interests include economic development, transition, labor, applied microeconomics as well as Chinese economy. In recent years, he has published papers on migration and poverty, re-employment of dislocated urban workers, rising returns to education, human capital investments (education and health), wage inequality, and the impact of poverty alleviation programs. He also co-directed several large-scale household survey projects in China: the China Urban Labor Survey, the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study, and the Gansu Survey of Children and Families. He has consulted for the World Bank on China’s poverty assessment, the impact of education reforms, rural-urban inequality, urban social service provision, and unemployment in China.

Prof. Park serves on the editorial boards of the World Bank Economic Review, Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, Cambridge University Press Elements Series in the Economics of Emerging Markets and China Policy Journal. He is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London), the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, Bonn), the International Growth Centre (Oxford/LSE/DFID), and the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group (Chicago).