Lawrence J. Lau, a prominent Hong Kong economics professor, has been appointed board chairman of CIC International (Hong Kong) Co., the newly established wholly-owned subsidiary of the China Investment Corp. (CIC), the country's sovereign wealth fund.

Lau, 66, served as vice chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2004 to 2010 and is a member of the International Advisory Council of the CIC.

With a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, Lau had worked at Stanford University since 1966 and headed the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research from 1997 to 1999. In 1966 he developed one of the first econometric models in China, and has continued to revise and update it since then.

The CIC was founded in September 2007 to mitigate risks in China's huge foreign exchange reserves. The Ministry of Finance issued 1.55 trillion yuan ($208 billion) worth of special treasury bonds to buy forex reserves and injected the funds into CIC.