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Dr Julia Wanwan Zhu

Dr Julia Wanwan Zhu

  • Position: Lecturer in Accounting and Finance
  • Areas of expertise: Leadership & Governance; CEO Succession; Top Management Team; Executive Compensation; Debt Contracting; Corporate Innovation; ESG; Climate Finance; Banking; AI and Fintech
  • Email: W.Zhu@leeds.ac.uk

Profile

Wanwan (Julia) Zhu is a Lecturer in the Accounting and Finance Department at Leeds University Business School. She completed her PhD in Accounting and Finance at LUBS and joined the School as a Lecturer in January 2020.

Responsibilities

  • Academic Personal Tutor of BSc Accounting and Finance students
  • Academic Personal Tutor of MSc Accounting and Finance students
  • Access to Leeds Tutor

Research interests

Julia’s research focuses on empirical corporate finance and corporate governance, with particular emphasis on CEO succession, top management teams, executive compensation, debt contracting, and corporate innovation. These topics are fundamental to understanding how firms make key financial and governance decisions, and how these decisions influence performance, value creation, and risk management.

In addition, she has developed strong interests in environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues, climate finance, banking, and the application of AI and FinTech in finance. These areas represent important and rapidly evolving fields that extend her research agenda beyond traditional corporate governance and finance, while also enabling her to engage with pressing global challenges around sustainability, financial innovation, and technological disruption.

Julia’s work seeks to generate robust, evidence-based insights into the mechanisms that drive corporate behaviour and financial outcomes. For example, her research on executive succession and compensation examines how leadership structures and incentives affect strategic decision-making and firm performance, while her studies on debt contracting investigate how monitoring and information shape contractual design and investor protection. Her projects on ESG and climate finance explore how sustainability concerns influence capital markets and corporate policies, contributing to the growing literature on the intersection between finance and society.

Qualifications

  • PhD, Acccounting and Finance, University of Leeds, UK
  • Associate Fellow of The Higher Education Academy (AFHEA)

Student education

I am currently teaching LUBS0040 Introductory Accounting, LUBS1035 Foundations of Finance, and LUBS1036 Introduction to Finance. I have led and participated in a variety of modules in corporate finance and management accounting for both specialists and non-specialists. The modules I have previously taught include LUBS1245 Introductory Management Accounting, LUBS1925 Introduction to Management Accounting, LUBS1225 Accounting for Managers, LUBS2205 Corporate Finance, and LUBS2225 Credit and Financial Analytics.