xiao yu wang

Dr. Xiao Yu Wang is the Chief Economist of CRI Foundation, and was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Duke University from 2013-2022. 

As Chief Economist, she uses her expertise in rigorous research and evidence-backed policymaking to ensure that CRI Foundation awards grants that maximize the impact-for-cost of innovations that reduce poverty and generate novel, high-quality evidence. She also acts as a research consultant and works with grantees to improve their programs and evaluations. 

As a researcher, she develops theories and takes them to data in order to discover and quantify key mechanisms so that better policies and programs can be designed and implemented, especially for the most vulnerable people. An applied microeconomic theorist, she studies questions spanning development, organizational, financial, political, and labor economics by forensically uncovering individual and institutional motives via building minimal testable models that explain as close to the complete sets of behaviors and patterns as possible within traditional and non-traditional markets. Examples of her work include a novel program to end child marriage, the connection between risk environments, income inequality, and entrepreneurship, the impact of bureaucratic promotion on citizen welfare, and the ways in which traditional economic models help and hinder us in developing policy around new technologies.

Dr. Wang has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University and Yale University. She was a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economics Research (DEV) from 2014-2022 (and would be reinstated upon a return to academia). She also served as the inaugural Director of Operations for the China Econ Lab. She received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2013, where she was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and her B.A. with honors in economics, with honors in mathematics, and with honors in the liberal arts (creative writing) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008. She is a passionate advocate for collaboration across fields, openness to new ideas, and ketchup. 

Dr. Wang is from a small town in central Wisconsin. Yes, really.