Edwin Lai is currently Associate Director of the Center for Economic Policy (since 2021). He was Professor of Economics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (2009 - 2023), and later jointly appointed as the Director of the Center for Economic Development (2017-2021) and jointly-appointed as Professor in the Division of Public Policy (2018 - 2023). He was Senior Research Economist and Adviser at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas of the Federal Reserve System of the USA, from August 2007 to June 2009. Before that he was Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University, Associate Professor at City University of Hong Kong and Associate Professor at Singapore Management University. His main research areas are international economics, industrial organization, growth and internationalization of renminbi. He has published extensively and intensively on the economics of intellectual property rights protection and innovation. He has published in leading journals in economics such as American Economic Review, RAND Journal of Economics, International Economic Review, and Journal of International Economics.

He is the author of the book One Currency, Two Markets: China’s Attempt to Internationalize the Renminbi, Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press (2021).
 
Prof. Lai has been a consultant to the World Bank, visiting scholar/fellow with Boston University, Princeton University, Kobe University, CESifo (University of Munich), Hitotsubashi University and Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research. He is Associate Editor of Review of International Economics (Wiley Publisher), a Fellow of the CESifo Research Network (U of Munich) and a board member of Asia-Pacific Trade Seminars (APTS) Group. He received his B.Sc. in engineering from University of Hong Kong and A.M. and Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University.