1975–
An economist who traces state policy through historical data
“To us, that was amazing … In the beginning, we could not believe it, but that is what the data show.”
Nancy Qian is an economist whose work spans development economics, political economy, and economic history, using large datasets and rigorous empirical methods to study how institutions and policy shape people’s lives. Her research on China and autocratic states connects questions of gender inequality, education, and the political economy of famine. With Andrei Markevich and Natalya Naumenko, she coauthored a 2021 study that compared regional mortality and grain procurement, presenting quantitative evidence on ethnic bias and centrally planned procurement during the Ukrainian famine. The study contributes data to debates that treat the Holodomor not only as a problem of production, but also as an outcome of state allocation and coercive procurement.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 2001B.A., University of Texas at Austin
- 2005Ph.D. in Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- 2005–2009Assistant Professor of Economics, Brown University
- 2007–2009Harvard Academy Fellow, Harvard University
- 2009–2016Professor and Associate Professor of Economics, Yale University
- 2017–현재James J. O’Connor Professor, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
- 2021Coauthor of “The Causes of Ukrainian Famine Mortality, 1932–33”
Related historical events
Missing Women and the Effects of Sex-Specific Income
Qian's best-known research line explains the sex imbalance in developing countries, the so-called problem of 'missing women,' through the sex-specific effects of income. In 'Missing Women and the Price of Tea in China' (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2008), she exploited the fact that post-Mao reforms raised sex-specific agricultural income to estimate how total income and sex-specific income affected the sex-differential survival of children. Holding male income constant, an increase in female income improved survival rates for girls; holding female income constant, an increase in male income worsened them. Education divided the same way: higher female income raised the educational attainment of all children, while higher male income lowered it for girls and had no effect on boys. Because tea is picked primarily by women, the post-1978 opening raised tea prices and with them women's earnings and their share of household income in tea-producing regions, and that shift fed into girls' survival and investment in education. A Harvard Kennedy School research summary likewise states that improved economic conditions for women in China increased girls' survival and children's educational attainment. The same questions continued in later work. In a 2017 UNU-WIDER working paper she documented that the introduction of the One Child Policy sharply increased sex selection in certain regions, that the government responded by allowing parents whose first child was a daughter to try for a second, and that this relaxation increased family size and thereby raised school enrolment of first-born daughters. A 2014 coauthored paper on Taiwan examined how access to abortion affected sex ratios at birth and excess female mortality. What marks this body of work is that it treats sex imbalance not as a cultural residue but as an economic outcome responsive to household income distribution and policy shocks.