Sheng Guo

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Professional Activities

Dr. Sheng Guo was born in a small town in the central part of China, slightly north to the Yangtze River. He had excellent academic grades all the way up to college, but was mostly bored during his college years at Wuhan University. After graduation in 1998, he worked for an Internet startup in Beijing and had no clues why a shaky business with negative profits would attract investment interests from all over the world. Realizing that perhaps academics are more reasonable, he went back to school, this time at Renmin University of China for graduate studies in the history of economic thought. While Marxian economics again bored him during that short spell of study, he found books written by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman intellectually very refreshing and satisfying. He started to apply for graduate schools in the U.S., and particularly tailored his personal statement to the University of Chicago proclaiming his admiration of Friedman’s ideas. In the end, the only admission offer he received with financial aid came from the University of Chicago. He graduated in 2008 with a Ph.D. degree in economics, specializing in the fields of household finance, housing economics, and labor economics, with research interests in household savings and consumption decisions.

Upon graduation, Sheng Guo was appointed as a tenure-track assistant professor at the Department of Economics at Florida International University (FIU) in August, 2008. Starting to work, he was at loss at first in adjusting the transition from a student’s life to a full-time academic’s, but he found himself gradually enjoying more and more on the job, with teaching steadily improving. He published five scholarly articles in peer-reviewed high-quality general-interest and field journals and engaged in four grant proposal submissions. He had his research work presented in numerous regional, national and international academic conferences and government agencies. Unfortunately, the fierce competition in academic research caught him off guard, and he found himself losing on the time clock of tenure. Even with the best efforts in the last two years of his tenure as an assistant professor, he still came up short of a couple of top-notch journal publications. He was denied tenure in 2015-2016.

That was a dark period for him, and it was particularly poignant when FIU, as a whole, was embarking on the booming phase. He felt left behind. Fortunately, with the good-will efforts of many involved, he was offered an instructor position shortly after receiving the rejection letter for tenure. He credited FIU as “the best place to work for couples” in South Florida even though FIU itself never claims so. Now without the pressure for research, he finds himself embracing research more freely and wholeheartedly, at the same enjoying a confident command of the classroom in teaching. He has two papers at the stage of revision and resubmission and several projects in the pipeline. He was also awarded a reputable grant from the Social Security Administration for the research on retirement security in the U.S. He was appointed to Dissertation Advisor Status during the summer of 2018.

He thinks life is hopeful, after all.

Publications