Biography

I am an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University, and a Fellow of the OSF Ideas Workshop. I work on policy responses to inflation and have advised policymakers in the US and Germany on price stabilization measures. My next book, ESSENTIAL: Inflation, Profits and Survival in an Age of Emergencies, will be published in 2026, and will be translated into seven languages. My first book How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate won the Joan Robinson Prize, Keynes Preis and the Hans-Matthöfer Preis and the International Studies Association Best Interdisciplinary Book Award. It was translated into five languages and feautred on the best book of 2021 lists by the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, Project Syndicate and Folha de S.Paulo, among others. My writings have appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, Project Syndicate, die ZEIT and Süddeutsche Zeitung. I was the principal investigator of the ESRC-funded Rebuilding Macroeconomics project What Drives Specialization? A Century of Global Export Patterns. I have a Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research, New York, and a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge. I have been a visiting researcher at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and speak Chinese fluently.