Xiaoting Sun joins the Department of Economics as an Assistant Professor

This fall, Xiaoting Sun will be joining the Department of Economics. Her area of research is in Econometrics, Xiaoting completed her MA and BA in economics and BS in management at Peking University, Beijing, China. Then proceeded to get her Ph.D. from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), USA. During her time at UCLA she received a best paper award in econometrics, being the only recipient in the field of econometrics.

With the overlap of Econometrics and Microeconomics, her work builds the connection between the microeconomic theory model and the data under mild restrictions on the model. However, the main difference is that Econometrics develops tools for the empirical studies of economics. As she best puts it, Econometrics provides tools and methodological framework that help people obtain information from the available data. Microeconomics builds models that explain individual, household, or firm’s behaviors.

Xiaoting will teach a first-year PhD econometrics course, Econometrics Theory I (Econ 837). In spring 2020, she will teach two undergraduate courses: one is Statistical Analysis of Economic Data (Econ 333), the other is selected topics in economics: Market Design.

Some of her working papers include

• Identification of Many-to-one Matching under Complementary Preference
• Unobserved Ability and Return to College
•  Gender Differences in Parental Investments and Intergenerational Transfers in China, with Xiaoyan Lei, Kathleen McGarry, and Yaohui Zhao

Pre-PhD Publications

- Depressive symptoms and SES among the mid-aged and elderly in China: Evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study national baseline, with Xiaoyan Lei, John Strauss, Peng Zhang, and Yaohui Zhao, Social Science & Medicine 120 (2014): 224-232.

- Gender differences in cognition in China and reasons for change over time: Evidence from CHARLS, with Xiaoyan Lei, James P. Smith, and Yaohui Zhao.  The Journal of the Economics of Ageing 4 (2014): 46-55.

- Health outcomes and socio-economic status among the mid-aged and elderly in China: Evidence from the CHARLS national baseline data, with Xiaoyan Lei, John Strauss, Yaohui Zhao, Gonghuan Yang, Perry Hu, Yisong Hu, Xiangjun Yin, The Journal of the Economics of Ageing, 3, 29-43.