Rate My Professor Ai Jun Hou

Ai Jun Hou is a Professor of Finance at Stockholm Business School, part of the Business & Economics discipline at Stockholm University, where she serves as the representing professor of the finance section. She obtained her PhD in Economics from Lund University in May 2011, an MSc in Financial Economics from the University of Gothenburg (2003-2005), a Master's in Finance from the University of Hull (2000-2002), and a Bachelor's in Business from the University of Hertfordshire (1996-2000). Prior to her current role, she held an Assistant Professorship at the Department of Business and Economics, University of Southern Denmark (2011-2013), followed by Assistant Professor (2013-2016), Associate Professor (2017-2020), and Professor of Finance (2021-present) at Stockholm Business School. Hou heads the finance section and teaches master's-level courses in Financial Institutions Management and Portfolio Theory, as well as bachelor's-level Empirical Finance.

Hou's research interests include international finance, household finance, empirical asset pricing, financial econometrics, volatility and correlation modeling, derivatives pricing, financial markets microstructure, and corporate finance. Her publications appear in leading journals such as the Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Banking & Finance, and Journal of Financial Econometrics. Key works include "The trade imbalance network and currency returns" (with Lucio Sarno and Xiaoxia Ye, Journal of Financial Economics, 2025), "From employee to entrepreneur: The role of unemployment risk" (with Sara Jonsson, Xiaoyang Li, and Qinglin Ouyang, Journal of Financial Economics, 2025), "The effect of Uncertainty on Volatility and Correlation" (with Hossein Asgharian and Charlotte Christiansen, Journal of Banking & Finance, 2023), "Pricing cryptocurrency options" (with Weining Wang, Cathy Chen, and Wolfgang Härdle, Journal of Financial Econometrics, 2020), and "Spillover effects of monetary policy and information shocks" (with Ian Khrashchevskyi, Sandy Suardi, and Caihong Xu, Finance Research Letters, 2024). She has received Bankforskningsinstitutet research grants (2008, 2010) and serves as Associate Editor for the International Review of Financial Analysis since 2019. Ongoing projects address trade imbalances' effects on financial markets, risk spillovers, trading invariance in futures markets, herding in equities, and social networks' impact on CEO overconfidence.