Personal Chair in Corporate Finance
Roles and Responsibilities
- Course Leader for Shareholder Value and ESG (MSc), Financial Development (MSc) and the Dissertation Module (MSc).
Background
Professor Wenxuan Hou (Wen) is Chair and Professor of Corporate Finance at the University of Edinburgh, a position he has held since 2016. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), Member of the Academia Europaea (MAE) and Fellow of the Royal Economic Society (FREcon). His research examines how historical legacies and institutional structures shape economic governance and political order. He has published on corporate finance, financial development and the institutional determinants of firm behaviour, with work appearing in the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Journal of Corporate Finance, and European Journal of Operational Research among others. His current work extends these concerns to the foundations of authority, legitimacy, and political order through a book project on inhabited authority and a series of articles under review and in revision. He has published several books and received multiple awards for teaching and mentorship, including the Award for Excellence in Doctoral Supervision and several Best Teaching Awards.
Professor Hou previously served as Co-Chair of the Young Academy of Scotland (2018-2021) and 30th President of the Chinese Economic Association (UK/Europe). He was Co-Editor of The British Accounting Review (2021–2025), the flagship journal of the British Accounting and Finance Association (ranked top four in Business Finance and top one in Accounting by the 2024 Impact Factor), and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Chinese Economic and Business Studies (2020–2025), an Oxford-based Q1 journal on sustainable development. He also holds an Honorary Professorship at the University of Cape Town.
Research Interests
Professor Hou's research focuses on how institutional, historical, and civilizational structures shape economic governance and collective life. He connects corporate finance with comparative development, exploring how law, culture, and social norms influence firms' access to finance and their responses to technological and environmental change. A growing strand of his research asks how political communities sustain, contest, and inhabit the orders they live within, and what makes authority legible as legitimate across civilizational settings.
Recent Publications:
- Hao, F., Hou, W., & Liu, Y. (2026). Hydraulic origins of finance: Irrigation and firm access to credit. Journal of Banking & Finance, 107747.
- Lu, J., Hou, W., & Main, B. G. (2025). The cultural legacy of historical ethnic violence: The impact on access to finance and innovation. Journal of Financial Intermediation, 61, 101119.
- Hou, W., Li, M., Main, B. G., & Liu, X. (2023). Pandemics and financial development: A lesson from the 1918 influenza pandemic. Journal of Corporate Finance, 83, 102498.
- Liu, X., Hou, W., & Main, B. G. (2022). Anti-market sentiment and corporate social responsibility: Evidence from anti-Jewish pogroms. Journal of Corporate Finance, 76, 102260.
- An, J., Hou, W., & Lin, C. (2022). Epidemic disease and financial development. Journal of Financial Economics, 143(1), 332-358.
Professor Hou considers PhD applications in corporate finance, financial development, and related questions concerning the political and institutional foundations of economic order.