Nancy Qian

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Nancy Qian (born in Shanghai, China) is a Chinese American economist and currently serves as the James J. O'Connor Professor in the Kellogg School of Management Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences and a Professor by Courtesy at the Department of Economics at Northwestern University. Her research interests include development economics, political economy and economic history. She is a leading development economist and an expert of autocracies and the Chinese economy. [1]

Contents

Early life and education

Born in Shanghai, Nancy Qian pursued her higher education in the United States, earning a B.A. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2001 and a Ph.D. in economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005, where she was advised by Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Joshua Angrist.

Career

After her graduation, she first worked as an assistant professor at Brown University (2005–09) and then at Yale University (2009–13), where she was promoted to associate professor (2013–16), and was a Harvard Academy scholar (2007–09). Since 2017 she has been the James J. O'Connor Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management. In parallel, Qian has held visiting appointments at Fudan University, New York University, Princeton University, Harvard University and the Booth School of Business. She is affiliated with NBER, BREAD, CEPR, ASSA and the Econometric Society. Finally, in terms of professional service, she is currently serving on the editorial boards of the Journal of Development Economics , Economica , Journal of the European Economic Association , American Economic Journal: Applied Economics , and the Review of International Organizations . [2]

Research

Qian's research uses rigorous empirical analysis to address big-picture questions in development economics, political economy, and economic history. A common theme in her research is to use institutional details, policy shocks, large demographic and historical data to understand the detailed processes of long-run economic, cultural and institutional development. Her research has been influenced by the works of Amartya Sen. In her most well-known paper - Missing Women and the Price of Tea in China - Qian uses the impact of China's economic opening to estimate the effects of parents' relative contributions to a household's income on the difference between boys' and girls' survival rates, which stands at the core of the phenomenon of "missing women" in China. In particular, she finds that China's post-1978 economic opening caused the price for tea in China to increase as a consequence of greatly increased external demand, which in turn tended to increase the income of women in tea-producing regions; this, in turn, had a substantial positive impact on survival rates for girls and educational attainment for all children. [3]

She (together with Xin Meng and Pierre Yared) also documents that the centrally planned grain procurement policy contributed to around half of the mortality during China's Great Famine. [4] One of her works, falling under development economics, focuses on the how family size affects a child's educational attainment, a relevant question in the field of labor economics. Her extensive research in China led her to conclude that an increase in family size has a negative effect on child educational attainment, an issue that is specifically prevalent in developing countries. [5]

Another influential study shows that U.S. food aid is largely driven by U.S. objectives and can lead to more conflict in recipient countries. [6] A well-cited finding using historical data (together with Nathan Nunn) is that the introduction of the potato within the Columbian exchange may have been responsible for at least a quarter of the population and urbanisation growth observed in the Old World between 1700 and 1900. [7] A paper with Nathan Nunn and Sandra Sequeira shows that historical immigration to the United States increased productivity and innovation. [8] Another paper shows that workers in low-income countries accumulate less skills on the job than workers in rich countries and this contributes to cross-country income differences. [9]

Additionally, Qian has done extensive research on the Chinese economy. Qian has consulted for the World Bank, the Global Development Network and the China Development Bank. She is the co-organizer of the China NBER Workshop and an expert for VOX China. Her findings have been published in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy and the Review of Economic Studies, and featured in media outlets such as the New York Times, NPR and the Wall Street Journal.

As of October 2021, Qian belongs to the top 2% of economists ranked on IDEAS/RePEc. [10]

Personal

She is married to economist, Mikhail Golosov, of the University of Chicago.

Awards

Related Research Articles

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References

  1. ↑ Biography of Nancy Qian on the website of the Kellogg School of Management. Retrieved February 4, 2018.
  2. ↑ Curriculum vitae of Nancy Qian on the website of the Kellogg School of Management. Retrieved February 4, 2018.
  3. ↑ Qian, N. (2008). Missing Women and the Price of Tea in China: The Effect of Sex-Specific Earnings on Sex Imbalance. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123(3), pp. 1251-1285.
  4. ↑ Meng, X., Qian, N. and Yared, P. (2015). The Institutional Causes of China's Great Famine, 1959–1961. The Review of Economic Studies, 82(4), pp. 1568-1611.
  5. ↑ Qian, Nancy. "Quantity-Quality and the One Child Policy: The postive[sic] effect of family size on education in China" (PDF). Piketty. Retrieved 22 April 2019.
  6. ↑ Nunn, N., Qian, N. (2014). U.S. Food Aid and Civil Conflict. American Economic Review, 104(6), pp. 1630-66.
  7. ↑ Nunn, N., Qian, N. (2011). The Potato's Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence from a Historical Experiment. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 126(2), pp. 593-650.
  8. ↑ Sequeira, Sandra; Nunn, Nathan; Qian, Nancy (2019). "Immigrants and the Making of America" (PDF). The Review of Economic Studies. 87: 382–419. doi:10.1093/restud/rdz003.
  9. ↑ Lagakos, David; Moll, Benjamin; Porzio, Tommaso; Qian, Nancy; Schoellman, Todd (2017-12-01). "Life Cycle Wage Growth across Countries". Journal of Political Economy. 126 (2): 797–849. doi:10.1086/696225. ISSN   0022-3808. S2CID   85512975.
  10. ↑ "Economist Rankings | IDEAS/RePEc". ideas.repec.org. Retrieved 2021-12-05.
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