Finance, Empirical Law Scholar Edwin Hu To Join Faculty

Edwin “Eddy” Hu, an empirical law and finance expert, will join the University of Virginia School of Law faculty this summer.

With a background in applied computational math, economics, finance and law, Hu currently serves as a postdoctoral fellow at New York University School of Law, where he is affiliated with the Institute for Corporate Governance & Finance. His current research and writing is focused on financial advisers, institutional voting and equity market structure.

“Eddy Hu brings a wealth of real-world knowledge and experience on markets and finance to his research and teaching,” Dean Risa Goluboff said. “It’s my great pleasure to welcome him to the faculty.”

Hu earned a Ph.D. in finance from Rice University in 2016 and joined the Securities and Exchange Commission as a financial economist the same year.

While there, Hu “saw firsthand how our market’s most consequential policy decisions were so often made by lawyers and, in particular, the commissioners of the agency,” he said.

He then served as chief economist and counsel to SEC Commissioner Robert J. Jackson Jr. from 2018 to 2020, who further piqued his interest in “the legal side of things” and in pursuing a career in legal academia. Jackson, now back at NYU as a law professor, has served as Hu’s primary mentor and co-authored two papers with him.

“Eddy is that rare scholar who combines rigorous empirical analysis with careful study of the institutions that make financial markets work,” Jackson said. “But what makes him truly unique is that his work has already had enormous impact on the policies that protect everyday investors in those markets, which is why the White House and SEC alike have sought his advice.”

After his work at the SEC, Hu attended law school at NYU, where he was a Furman Scholar and was awarded the Law and Economics Prize, and the Order of the Coif Gasaway Award for best student paper on the topic. NYU’s Furman Academic Program is designed to train future law professors. In 2022, Hu worked at the White House National Economic Council, where he advised on financial regulatory reforms.

“We saw him present at the American Economics Association annual meeting the year before he went on the teaching market, and I think we all perceived he was going to be a star in the market,” said Professor Joshua Fischman, who led the Law School’s faculty hiring committee over the past year and directs the school’s Center for Public Law and Political Economy. “We were very lucky to get him.”

In addition to his policy work, Hu has published three articles — in the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Financial Intermediation and the Stanford Law Review — and has another two undergoing peer review and four working papers.

The Stanford Law Review article, which he co-authored with Jackson and Stanford Law professor Colleen Honigsberg, created a novel data set to demonstrate that many financial advisers who commit misconduct continue advising investors simply by switching to advise on a different investment product that falls under a different regulator. The paper calls for reforms that include a unified database of adviser misconduct, increasing required disclosures and upping firm liability for individual misconduct.

His research has shaped national policy debates about our capital markets, with work featured prominently across major media outlets, including The Atlantic, Bloomberg, The Economist, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the front page of The Wall Street Journal.

“When I graduated from college with a degree in economics and applied computational math, it was basically the depth of the recession, so I wanted to get a Ph.D. to learn more about how the markets work,” Hu said. “I decided to go into government in part to understand the market failures that led to the recession and work on preventing the next one. But I realized that a lot of research wasn’t getting translated to policymaking audiences, so I wanted to produce research and writing that policymakers can actually use.”

The hiring committee appreciated that Hu’s papers “closely informed” new regulations issued by the SEC and the Department of Labor, Fischman said.

Hu earned two bachelor’s degrees, in economics and applied computational math, from the University of Washington before earning his master’s degree and Ph.D. at Rice.

He said he was attracted to UVA Law in part by the John W. Glynn Jr. Law & Business Program, which offers students a host of specialized business law courses to prepare them to better serve corporate clients, work in-house or start businesses of their own. He has previously taught corporate finance to MBA students at Rice. Hu will teach Corporations in the spring semester at UVA.

“Eddy is a rigorous scholar intent on studying — and learning — from the world around him, seeking to make our markets a safe place to plan for families’ futures,” Jackson said. “In this way, he is a perfect fit for Virginia’s renowned corporate and securities law community, which has been shaping scholarship and policy in the field for decades.”