
Seung Joo Lee
Associate Professor of Finance
- seung.lee@sbs.ox.ac.uk
Saïd Business School
University of Oxford
Park End Street
Oxford
OX1 1HP
Profile
Seung is an Associate Professor of Finance at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley, where he was a Regents’ fellow. Before then, he studied at Seoul National University in Korea, obtaining his BS in Physics and MA in Economics.
From June 2016 to May 2019, Seung took a leave from his PhD programme to serve in Republic of Korea Army as first lieutenant. There he worked at Korea Military Academy, where he taught various economics courses (including Intermediate Microeconomics, Game Theory and its Applications, and Environmental Economics) to army cadets as Lecturer (until May 2017) and Assistant Professor of Economics (June 2017 onwards).
View Seung’s Personal webpage and Twitter.
Research
Seung’s research interests are broad, and have been focused on:
- Asset pricing – Bond markets and the term-structure of interest rates
- Macroeconomics – Monetary policy and financial stability
- Corporate finance – Risk management by contracting, information revelation issues in agency setting
Bond markets and the quantitative easing (QE)
Seung’s recent work is concerned with the quantitative easing (QE) programs and how they interact with segmented Treasury bond markets in regard to the business cycle stabilization. His theoretical work clearly conveys pros and cons of the QE programs in a quantitative manner, while his more recent empirical work estimates the degree to which the U.S. Treasury bond markets of different maturities are fragmented from one another.
Monetary policy and financial stability targeting
Seung’s Job Market Paper studies whether conventional monetary policies that target inflation and output, the two most widely used mandates for central banking, can tackle financial stability. In a world where the business cycle and financial markets are entangled, his work shows that conventional ‘Taylor Rules’ must be augmented in a way that they target financial stability measures (eg risk-premium) in order to prevent interesting sunspot equilibria from arising and raising the business cycle cost.
Contract theory and corporate finance
Seung has been working on the optimal contracting for risk-management purposes and some mathematical problems around the issue.
Teaching
Seung will be teaching Firms and Markets (Microeconomics) to MBA students in 2022-2023.
- MBA: Firms and Markets
- Executive MBA: Business Finance