Liang Peng
Professor of Risk Management
The Philip H. Sieg Professor of Business Administration
Dr. Liang Peng is a Professor of Risk Management and the Philip H. Sieg Professor of Business Administration at the Penn State Smeal College of Business. Before joining Penn State, Dr. Peng was an associate professor of real estate at the University of Colorado Boulder and an assistant professor of finance at the University of Cincinnati. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics, his M Phil in Economics, and his MA in Economics at Yale University. Dr. Peng earned his MS in Business administration and BS in Applied Mathematics at Renmin University. He is also a fellow of the Real Estate Research Institute.
Dr. Peng’s research revolves around housing markets, commercial real estate, and how these industries interact with politics and the economy. An interesting project that he is currently working on is how the anti-corruption in China affected government and party officials’ behavior and thus prices of luxury houses in Beijing (Politics and Asset Prices: China’s Anti-corruption Campaign and Prices of Luxury Homes in Beijing). In one of his most cited research papers, Dr. Peng, Gina Nicolosi, and Ning Zhu discuss how the results of past investments influence the future endeavors of stock investors (Do Individual Investors Learn from Their Trade Experience?).
Being a professor and researcher in the real estate industry allows Dr. Peng to understand and answer questions about society, the market, politics, and ourselves through real estate. He has the opportunity to conduct research on interesting topics and answer important questions using data and solid evidence. Much of his research demonstrates how real estate markets are impacted by human behavior, law changes, and topics that do not seem to be related to real estate at first glance. Dr. Peng believes that the topics he researches were inspired by his thesis advisor, Robert Shiller, who won the Nobel Prize for Behavioral Studies.
Dr. Peng is extremely proud to be part of such a distinguished group of scholars as a faculty member in the Real Estate Department at Penn State. He believes the faculty members are instrumental to students in helping them gain valuable skills because they are extremely well-trained and influential in their research.
Dr. Peng teaches courses in real estate and risk management. In his quantitative methods for real estate classes, he works to make the content accessible and easy to understand for anyone, not just those students with backgrounds in math, coding, and real estate. Besides being a professor and researcher, Dr. Peng enjoys art and history and has a love for good food!