Au Yong is a corporate finance scholar, researching contentious issues surrounding corporate governance, capital management, and risk management. Au Yong examined both internal and external corporate governance. Her internal governance research areas are management’s incentives on corporate investment and risk management decisions. In addition, Au Yong studies the importance of gender diversity on corporate boards. A key contribution of her research emphasises the need for a critical mass of women on boards, rather than tokens, to reduce earnings management due to their superior monitoring role. This article was awarded the E. Yetton Prize 2017 for the best paper published in the Australian Journal of Management.

Building upon her earlier work, she extended her studies to external governance, examining the role of dual holder (entities that are both shareholder and debtholder) monitoring in explaining corporate decisions.  She is currently researching the drivers of corporate green innovations and their impacts.

Au Yong conducts research that explores the capital raising and payout practices of Australian companies. These projects originate from her team’s ARC Discovery Grant where she was a Chief Investigator. The findings of these projects contribute to our understanding of retail and institutional shareholder participation in the Australian equity markets, where studies are relatively limited.

Au Yong has published widely in international peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, International Review of Finance, Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Australian Journal of Management and International Review of Financial Analysis. She has won competitive research grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and the Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand (AFAANZ).

Au Yong specialises in teaching corporate finance and financial markets at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. In 2020, her teaching innovations were recognised with the Monash Business School Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence. 

Au Yong was the Department PhD Program Director from 2014-2017. She is an active reviewer of many international journals and external grants. From 2020-2023, she is one of the coordinators of GARNET (Governance and Regulatory Research Network), a multi-disciplinary research network at the Monash Business School. 

BFC2140 Corporate Finance 1

BFC3140 Corporate Finance 2

BFF3140 Advanced Corporate Finance 

BFF5925 Financial Management Theory

BFC5926 Financial Institutions and Markets