Luyuan Guan

I am a 2nd year PhD student and research associate at the Chair of Economic History, Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Tübingen, supervised by Prof. Jörg Baten. I hold an MA in Finance from the University of International Business and Economics and a BA in Economics from Jilin University. 

My research examines how human capital, gender, and living standards evolved across Asia and Europe over the past two millennia, and what institutional and demographic forces — invasion, urbanization, market integration, political enfranchisement — shaped these long-run trajectories. 

My recent work reconstructs bioarchaeological inequality trends in Italy from antiquity to the early-modern period (with Jörg Baten and Irene Barbiera, revise and resubmit at the Economic History Review), and develops a framework linking human stature to real wages across a 2,500-year, global sample (with Jörg Baten). I am also interested in how political change shapes investment within the household, and use a gender height-gap measure across 187 countries to show that women's suffrage narrowed the gap in children's health between sons and daughters. 

From March to May 2027, I will be a visiting PhD student at Boston University.

Contact:

Chair of Economic History
Melanchthonstrasse 30
72074 Tübingen, Germany
luyuan.guan@uni-tuebingen.de