ABOUT ME
I am a Research Assistant Professor at the Brown School and an Economist at the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis. I am affiliated with the Sinquefield Center for Applied Economic Research at Saint Louis University.
My research lies at the intersection of household finance, labor and personnel economics, and public economics. I study how individuals and markets respond to incentives, information, institutional rules, and regulation. My current work examines topics including debt repayment and financial well-being, job search and labor supply, talent identification and performance evaluation, human capital development, and the effects of policy and regulatory interventions. Across these areas, I use causal inference, field and survey experiments, and large-scale administrative and behavioral data.
Methodologically, I leverage high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud-based infrastructure (AWS, Apache Spark) to analyze large-scale, unstructured data. I design scalable data pipelines capable of processing billions of observations, ranging from high-frequency taxi trip records to smartphone geolocation data. This approach enables rigorous econometric analysis of complex policy and market questions, including the effects of regulatory oversight and service efficiency in taxi markets.
I completed my Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in June 2021 with guidance and mentorship from Peter Kuhn, Emanuel Vespa, and Gary Charness(†). Prior to my current role, I completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Finance at Saint Louis University under the supervision of Michael Podgursky and Marc Painter.
EMAIL: guangli@wustl.edu and guangli.zhang@slu.edu,