Y. Stephen Chiu received his undergraduate education in physics at Hong Kong Baptist College, and graduate education in economics at the Pennsylvania State University, where he obtained his PhD degree in 1995. He had since taught at The Chinese University of Hong Kong until he joined The University of Hong Kong in 2002. He has been the principal investigator of three competitive earmarked grants, and was a Research Fellow in the Hong Kong Institute of Monetary Research during the summer of 2001. He is currently the director of the Master of Economics programme at HKU.

Steve is a theorist and has written papers in different areas of economics. He likes models in which decision makers have non-negligible effects on the environment where they situate. He has published a few papers on bargaining. In one paper, the widely used solution concept Shapley value is implemented as the unique outcome in a non-cooperative game under the least restrictive conditions. Two other papers clear up the profession's confusion on two concepts in bargaining theory -- threat point and outside option -- and as a consequence also urge the profession to re-think important insights from the now influential property rights approach of firm theory. More recently he has written papers on the micro-foundations of currency crisis. He has re-examined the issue of multiple equilibria in more realistic models of currency attacks. Another paper constructs a currency crisis model in which the monetary authority's credibility problem arises from both time consistency and information asymmetry.

For leisure, Steve enjoys hiking, tennis, swimming, and especially reading. He enjoyed James Boswell's biography of Samuel Johnson very well. He was very amused by the weird encounter between Johnson and Adam Smith, and how Johnson later on altered his view on Smith after realizing that the latter had in fact taught Boswell -- the biography writer --- the styles of writing.