Associate Professor Wing Wah Tham

Wing Wah Tham's personal webpage

Wing Wah Tham is Scientia Associate Professor of Finance at the UNSW Business School, University of New South Wales. He previously served on the faculty of the Econometric Institute at Erasmus School of Economics and has held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, HEC Paris, Singapore Management University, and the National University of Singapore.

Professor Tham's research lies at the intersection of innovation, industrial organization, and finance. His work examines how firms create, organize, protect, and commercialize knowledge, and how these processes shape competition, firm value, and economic growth. Spanning the innovation life cycle, his research studies the production of technological knowledge through R&D, the organization and careers of inventors and scientists, the disclosure and diffusion of innovation through patents, and the commercialization of technology into products, market power, and economic performance.

A central theme of his research is the measurement of intangible assets and organizational capabilities that are fundamental to innovation but are typically unobserved in conventional economic data. Combining economic theory with large-scale administrative datasets, computational text analysis, and machine learning methods, he has developed novel measures of product market positioning, technological disclosure, knowledge spillovers, and human capital within firms. His work has mapped the product space of the U.S. economy using millions of trademark filings, quantified the completeness of patent disclosure, and traced the movement of expertise across organizations and industries. More broadly, his research seeks to make economically important but otherwise invisible features of firms measurable, enabling the study of questions that were previously difficult to address empirically.

His earlier work examined technology, competition, and market design in electronic financial markets, among the first sectors of the economy to become fully digitized. This research analyzed how technological advantages emerge, dissipate, and are reshaped by market institutions and platform design.

Professor Tham's research has been published in leading journals including the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Management Science, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, and Journal of International Business Studies. His work has been presented at major conferences and institutions, including the NBER Summer Institute, American Economic Association, American Finance Association, European Finance Association, and the Econometric Society World Congress.

He is a founding executive of the UNSW Business AI Lab and organized the 2024 NBER–AIEA Innovation and Entrepreneurship Conference. He is a UNSW Scientia Fellow and has held Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Tinbergen Institute research fellowships. His research has received the Review of Financial Studies Editor's Choice designation, best paper awards from the Asian Finance Association and Northern Finance Association, and support from the Australian Research Council through a Discovery Project grant.

Before entering academia, Professor Tham trained as a mechanical engineer and served as a platoon commander in the Republic of Singapore Navy's Underwater Demolition Team. Outside academia, he is an endurance athlete who competes in long-distance triathlons and ultra-marathons.