Chen Lin

Hi, welcome! I’m Chen Lin, a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Bonn and a doctoral researcher at ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy. 

My research interests are applied microeconomics and economic history. I enjoy working on questions that have no ready-made dataset, where I first turn raw historical records into data and then turn data into answers. 

Most of my work is set in early 20th-century America, a time when cities and the countryside were being rewired by new transport and communication networks. Much of what we would like to know about that era, such as where people worked or which stores opened and closed, was never compiled into tidy statistics. It sits in thousands of pages of old directories and credit-rating books. A large part of my research involves building Python pipeline to turn scan pages of historical record into structured, analysis-ready datasets. I then use causal inference methods to study the economic effects of new infrastructure. 

Before Bonn, I studied economics and German at Beijing Normal University and spent an exchange semester at LMU Munich.

If you are interested in my work,  feel free to reach out or connect with me!