Tong Li's research and teaching focus on microeconomics and microeconometrics. In microeconomics, he is particularly interested in connecting theoretical models to empirical analysis, including the empirical study of strategic behavior among agents with asymmetric information. In microeconometrics, his work centers on the identification and inference of models with latent variables and game-theoretic models, as well as dynamic and nonlinear panel data models. He also works on causal inference, developing methods for the identification and estimation of treatment effects that can be applied to microeconomic data and policy evaluation.
His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the American Statistical Association's Committee on Law and Justice Statistics. He has published in leading economics journals, including Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, Quantitative Economics, the RAND Journal of Economics, the Journal of Econometrics, and Games and Economic Behavior.
Tong Li is an elected Fellow of both the Econometric Society and the International Association for Applied Econometrics. He currently serves as co-editor of both the Journal of Applied Econometrics and the Journal of Econometric Methods, and as an associate editor of the Journal of Econometrics.
He has supervised seventeen Ph.D. dissertations. His former students hold faculty positions at the London School of Economics, National Chi Nan University, North Carolina State University, the National University of Singapore, Queen's University, Renmin University of China, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Temple University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Texas at San Antonio, and others have joined Amazon and Google as economists and data analysts. He is ranked by RePEc among top 500 all time economists worldwide by the records of their graduate students.