Nancy Qian (born inShanghai,China) is aChinese Americaneconomist and currently serves as the James J. O'Connor Professor of economics at theKellogg School of Management MEDS and a Professor by Courtesy at the Department of Economics atNorthwestern University. Her research interests includedevelopment economics,political economy andeconomic history. She is a leading development economist and an expert of autocracies and the Chinese economy.[1]
Born inShanghai, Nancy Qian was educated in theUnited States, earning aB.A. at theUniversity of Texas at Austin in 2001 and aPh.D. in economics atMassachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005, where she was advised byEsther Duflo,Abhijit Banerjee andJoshua Angrist. She was a Harvard Academy post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, where she was mentored byJames A. Robinson andClaudia Goldin.
After her graduation, she first worked as an assistant professor atBrown University (2005–09) and then atYale University (2009–13), where she was promoted to associate professor (2013–16), and was aHarvard Academy scholar (2007–09). Since 2017 she has been the James J. O'Connor Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at theKellogg School of Management. In parallel, Qian has held visiting appointments atFudan University,New York University,Princeton University,Harvard University and theBooth School of Business. She is affiliated withNBER,BREAD,CEPR,ASSA and theEconometric Society. Finally, in terms of professional service, she is currently serving on the editorial boards of theJournal of Development Economics,Economica,Journal of the European Economic Association,American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and theReview of International Organizations.[2]
Qian's research uses rigorous empirical analysis to address big-picture questions indevelopment economics,political economy, andeconomic 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 ofAmartya 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 duringChina'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] In anotherstudy, she and her co-authors show that anti-ethnic Ukrainian bias was a major contributor to high famine mortality during the Great Soviet Famine of 1932–33.
Another influential study shows thatU.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 withNathan Nunn) is that the introduction of the potato within theColumbian exchange may have been responsible for at least a quarter of the population and urbanisation growth observed in theOld World between 1700 and 1900.[7] A paper withNathan 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 fewer 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 theWorld Bank, theGlobal Development Network and theChina Development Bank. She is the co-director of theGlobal Poverty Research Lab, the founder ofChina Econ Lab, and co-organizer of the ChinaNBER Workshop and an expert forVOX China. Her findings have been published in top academic journals such as theAmerican Economic Review, theJournal of Political Economy and theReview of Economic Studies, and featured in media outlets such as theNew York Times,NPR and theWall Street Journal.[citation needed]
As of October 2021, Qian belongs to the top 2% of economists ranked onIDEAS/RePEc.[10]
She is married to economist,Mikhail Golosov, of theUniversity of Chicago.
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