Chicheng Ma is an associate professor of economics at HKU Business School. He received his Ph.D. from the Social Science Division of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2011 and served successively as an assistant and associate professor at the School of Economics, Shandong University. His research focuses on development economics, cultural economics, political economy, and economic history, specializing 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. He is a Co-Principal Investigator of RGC’s Area of Excellence (AoE) project Quantitative History of China. He serves as Associate Editor of the Asian-Pacific Economic History Review, Executive Committee Member of the Hong Kong Economic Association, Co-Director of the International Society for Quantitative History, and Associate Director of the Centre for Quantitative History at Hong Kong University.