Nancy Qian is the James J. O’Connor Professor of Economics at the Kellogg School of Management MEDS department. Professor Qian holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a Harvard Academy post-doctoral fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Studies at Harvard University. She was an Associate Professor at the Department of Economics at Yale University prior to Kellogg.
Professor Qian’s research provides rigorous empirical evidence for the detailed processes of the root determinants of economic development: geography, demography, human capital (e.g., health, work experience), institutions and culture. She does this by investigating theoretically motivated questions with creative strategies and large data sets from modern and historical contexts around the world. Amongst other honors, she was named a Fellow of the Econometrics Society and received the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, as well as grants from the National Science Foundation and the Russel Sage Foundation. She is one of the most highly cited economists of her generation.
She is passionate about using research to address real-world problems and using higher education to encourage the personal and intellectual developments of students. At Northwestern, she has taught classes for full-time and part-time MBAs, EMBAs (awarded "Best Core Teacher"), Executive Education and Ph.D. students.
She co-directs the Global Poverty Research Lab, for which she founded the China Cluster. She also founded China Econ Lab, an independent organization aiming to promote high quality analysis of the Chinese economy.
Her work has been covered in media outlets such as NPR, New York Times, WSJ, FT, BBC. She regularly engages with high-level policymakers and business leaders about geo-political risk and the global economy, especially with respect to China. She contributes opinion editorials and is writing her first book, which has the working title “Inglorious Nations: The Rise, Fall and Reinvention of Large Civilizations”.
Outside of work, she enjoys cooking, reading, sports, travel and spending time with her family and friends.
