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Welcome to my personal website. I'm a development economist deeply motivated by a simple question: how can transformative technologies improve the lives of people who are too often left behind? 

To answer this question, I study how new technologies reshape human capital formation and productivity in developing countries. My research also explores institutional and policy designs to maximize the benefits of these technologies and reach those who need them most. 

In parallel, I develop NLP tools to analyze complex texts, opening new avenues for studying institutions and policies at scale. 

I am currently a Senior Economist at the Asian Development Bank. I hold a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis. 

What's New:

May 2025 - New paper on dynamic content extraction for text-to-table task accepted at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics(ACL), main conference. Link 

Apr 2025 - New working paper "Better Technology, Worse Motivation: GenAI’s Mediocrity Trap". Link

Nov 2024 - New forthcoming paper in the Journal of Asian Public Policy on how AI transforms public policy research. Link

Nov 2024 - New paper on complex structured data extraction accepted at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, main conference. Link

July 2024 - New forthcoming paper at the Journal of Econometrics on the gender differences in competitiveness. Link

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Email: yvonne.jie.chen@gmail.com  jichen@adb.org

Disclaimer: views expressed here are those of the authors and do not reflect the official views and policies of the ADB.