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 received the 2013 Swenson Bunn Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence.

In 2013, Sheng founded the Gustavus Finance Club and has since served as an 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 club's advisor, 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 participating and over 28,000 students responded to the study. He also regularly offers advice and consultation to the Investment Club and coordinates the club's stock market game competition every year.

Sheng's research has been multi-disciplinary, with extensive studies in the empirical analysis of strategic behavior and market dominance, capital market efficiency, and behavioral economics.  He has recently devoted time to research on international trade and finance.  His current research studies the productivity spillover effect of foreign direct investment in transition economies and the OECD.  One of his recent publications 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 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 with dissimilar attitudes toward risk may have different preferences toward positive skewness, resulting in a different magnitude of expected risk premium on negatively skewed assets.  The paper was published in the Journal of Risk and Financial Management in 2019l

Courses Taught