Rate My Professor Lingxuan Sean Wu

Lingxuan Sean Wu is an Assistant Professor of Finance in the Stern School of Business at New York University, where he joined in July 2025. He earned his PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 2025, with a dissertation committee including Xavier Gabaix, Ludwig Straub, Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, and Jeremy Stein. Prior to his doctoral studies, he received a BS in Mathematics and Physics and a BA in Economics with highest distinction from Tsinghua University in 2019, during which he was a visiting undergraduate student at Harvard University and UC Berkeley. Wu's research centers on macroeconomics and finance, particularly bounded rationality, financial intermediation, and government policy. His work examines individuals' limited understanding of shock propagation and its implications for asset pricing and stabilization policy. He has investigated how institutional investors transmit monetary policy across asset classes, the influence of financial market structure and asset supply on economic fluctuations and growth, and the role of competition in production networks in shaping industry distortions.

Wu has published in leading journals, including "Platform Competition and Interoperability: The Net Fee Model" with Mehmet Ekmekci and Alexander White in Management Science (October 2025). His papers "Monetary Transmission and Portfolio Rebalancing: A Cross-Sectional Approach" (with Xu Lu) and "Network Lerner Index: Demand and Distortions across Industries" are conditionally accepted at the Journal of Financial Economics and Review of Economic Studies, respectively. Key working papers include "Banking on Inattention" (with Xu Lu), which received the 2026 Midwest Finance Association WRDS Outstanding Paper Award in Financial Institutions; "A Theory of Land Finance and Investment-Led Growth"; "Thinking about the Economy, Deep or Shallow?" (with Pierfrancesco Mei); and "Mental Macro-Finance Models: Evidence and Theory." His accolades include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship in Behavioral Macroeconomics through the NBER (2024), NYU Stern Center for Global Economy and Business Faculty Grant (2025), John R. Meyer Dissertation Fellowship (2023), Desmond and Whitney Shum Fellowship (2023), invitation to the 7th Lindau Nobel Meeting on Economic Sciences (2022), and Chi-Sun Yeh Prize for Best Undergraduate Student in Physics from Tsinghua University (2019). Wu teaches Foundations of Finance at NYU Stern, has served as teaching assistant for Harvard PhD macro courses, and referees for journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He contributes to program committees for SFS Cavalcade North America 2026 and EFA Annual Meeting 2026.