Harrison Hong, a professor in the Department of Economics, has been named as the first John R. Eckel Jr. Professor in Financial Economics.

The professorship was established in 2013 with a gift of $3 million from the John R. Eckel Jr. Foundation, in honor of John Eckel CC’73, and is given to an economist whose academic work is well regarded internationally and who will teach either a financial core course or one of the economics elective courses for the financial economics major for College students.

Eckel was the founder of Copano Energy, which he grew from a single 23-mile pipeline to a successful midstream natural gas company with more than 6,000 miles of pipeline and seven processing plants; Copano was the first midstream company to trade publicly as a limited liability company. Eckel traced much of his success in business to his economics major while a student at the College.

Hong came to Columbia in 2016, after serving as the John Scully ’66 Professor of Economics and Finance at Princeton University. He received his B.A. in economics and statistics with highest distinction from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992 and his Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T. in 1997.

Hong’s work has covered diverse topics, including behavioral finance and market efficiency, agency and biased decisions, organizational diseconomies and performance, social interaction and investor behavior, and social responsibility and the stock market. In 2009, he was awarded the Fischer Black Prize, given once every two years to the best American finance economist under the age of 40.

Hong is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an editor of the International Journal of Central Banking. He has been an associate editor at the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Intermediation and a director of the American Finance Association.