Nancy Qian

Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies, Brown University

Nancy Qian is an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies, as well as an Assistant Professor of Development Economics at Brown University. She was born in Shanghai, China and spent the majority of her childhood across different parts of the American South. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics, Mathematics, Japanese and Government from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on development economic issues such as the economic determinants of missing women, the impact of the One Child Policy and the causes and long run health consequences of China’s Great Famine. Recently, she has worked on topics such as the impacts of the introduction of potatoes to the Old World on historical population growth, and the role that elections play in non-democratic societies. Her work has been presented at leading universities in the U.S., China, Australia and Europe, the National Bureau of Economics (NBER) and the Bureau of Research in Economics and Development (BREAD). She has also been featured in Liberation (French), the Voice of America and the Wall Street Journal.