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​Chicheng Ma is assistant professor of economics at the Business School of the University of Hong Kong. He graduated from the Social Science Division of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2011, and served successively as assistant and associate professor of economics at Shandong University from 2012 to 2017. 

Chicheng’s research areas are development economics, political economy, and economic history, specialising in the roles of culture, institutions, and human capital in shaping long-term economic and financial development. He won the Royal Economic Society Prize for the best paper published in the Economic Journal in 2020, the Research Output Prize of HKU Business School in 2021, and the Economic History Association’s Arthur H. Cole Prize for the best article in the Journal of Economic History in 2022. His works on Confucianism, pirates, Jesuits, clans, and informal finance were covered by various media such as Forbes, Financial Times, VoxChina, Broadstreet, and LSE Business Review.

As Principal Investigator, Chicheng has received competitive research grants of Hong Kong Research Grant Council (RGC) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). He is now a Co-Principal Investigator of RGC’s Area of Excellence (AoE) project Quantitative History of China. He serves as Associate Editor of the Australian Economic History Review, Executive Committee Member of Hong Kong Economic Association, and Co-Director of the International Society for Quantitative History.
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