Sheng YangFaculty

Dr. Sheng Yang, a native of Taiwan, joined Gustavus Adolphus College in 2011.  Sheng, a full professor of economics, teaches in the areas of economics and finance including Business Finance, Managerial Finance, Investments, and International Trade and Finance.  He is the recipient of 2013 Swenson Bunn Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence.

In 2013, Sheng founded the Gustavus Finance Club and has since served as advisor to the club. Over the past ten years, the club has hosted annual banquets and speaker panels and constantly organized events to promote financial education to students. As the advisor of the club, Sheng coordinates a campus-wide Study on Collegiate Financial Wellness (SCFW), a national survey of college students examining financial attitudes, practices, and knowledge with 90 campuses participated and over 28,000 students responded to the survey. He also offers advice and consultation to the Investment Club on a regular basis and coordinate the stock market game competition for the club every year.

Sheng's research has been interdisciplinary with extensive studies in the empirical analysis of strategic behavior and market dominance, capital market efficiency, and behavioral economics.  He has devoted time in research on International Trade and Finance recently.  His current research is a study of productivity spillover effect of foreign direct investment in transition economies and the OECD.  One of his recent publication in the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal investigated the short-run and long-run dynamics between exchange rates and stock prices and the path through which monetary policy shocks impact on these markets in small open economies. Using data from the Japanese stock market, Sheng and Thanh Nguyen ('15 Financial Economics major) empirically studied the significance of risk aversion with skewness preference that potentially delivers a premium. Their finding suggests that investors from different countries having dissimilar attitudes toward risk may possess different preferences toward positive skewness, which would result in a different magnitude of expected risk premium on negatively skewed assets.  The paper was published in Journal of Risk and Financial Management in 2019l

Courses Taught