Vanessa Wan Xu

Welcome to my page. I am Wan (Vanessa), a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University (PKU). 

My research interest primarily centers on economic growth, innovation, and industrial policy in a global context. My recent focus is the development of electric vehicles (EV)  and other green industries in China. We quantify the effect of Chinese government's industrial policies on domestic and global welfare, and investigates the mechanisms of policy sequencing and dynamic complementarity to provide implications for industrial policy design.

I am a co-founder of WEPT and the director of WPET Beijing.

I will join the Department of Economics at University of Chicago as a postdoctoral scholar in Autumn 2026.

Here is my latest CV.