Steven N. S. Cheung

Steven N. S. Cheung

Steven Ng-Sheong Cheung (traditional Chinese: 張五常; simplified Chinese: 张五常; pinyin: Zhāng Wǔcháng; born December 1, 1935), a Hong Kong born American economist who specializes in the fields of transaction costs and property rights, following the approach of new institutional economics. He achieved his public fame with an economic analysis on China open-door policy after 1980s. In his studies of economics, he focuses on economic explanation that is based on real world observation (an observation first approach). He is also the first to introduce concepts from the Chicago School of Economics, especially price theory, into China.

He obtained his PhD in economics from UCLA, where his teacher was American economist Armen Alchian and Jack Hirshleifer. He taught in the Department of Economics at the University of Washington from 1969 to 1982, and then at the University of Hong Kong from 1982 to 2000. During this period, Cheung reformed the syllabus of Hong Kong's A-level Economics examination, adding the concepts of the postulate of constrained maximization, methodology, transaction cost and property right, most of which originate from the theories of the Chicago school.