Biography
Ruishen Zhang joined The University of Hong Kong in 2024 as an Assistant Professor of Accounting. Before moving to Hong Kong, he was an Associate Professor of Accounting (without tenure) at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. He holds a Ph.D. in Accounting (summa cum laude) from the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management and was a visiting scholar at MIT Sloan School of Management.
His research centers on sustainability, which he views as a broader question than ESG. He studies how to measure firms’ exposure to climate change and social issues, how markets price ESG risks, and how preferences shape the production of sustainability information. A second strand examines corporate resilience — how firms’ organizational design shapes their adaptation to technological and political shocks. He is also interested in the formal and informal institutions surrounding these issues, especially in China, with work on language commonality and information production, pollution tax regulation, and sustainability standard setting.
His work draws on unstructured data, textual analysis, and large language models, and has been published in the Journal of Finance, Management Science, and The Accounting Review. Beyond academia, he serves as an independent director on the boards of Shanghai Fortune Techgroup, Venoseals Technology, and Harbin Bank Consumer Finance.