I am an Assistant Professor of Economics at the National School of Development, Peking University. My research as a development economist examines how people in low-income settings make decisions under poverty, and why development programs often fall short in practice. I combine field experiments, original data, and close engagement with real-world programs, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa.

My work studies health, service delivery, and household responses to shocks, and more recently the impacts of artificial intelligence on labor markets. Across contexts, I focus on how individual behavior and organizational design jointly shape development outcomes.

Contact: hangyu.economics [at] gmail.com · hyu [at] nsd.pku.edu.cn

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Recent

• 2026-04 — New working paper: When Incentives Aren’t Enough: Evidence on Inattention and Imperfect Memory from HIV Medication Adherence (with Stolove, Yang, Riddell, Mahumane).
• 2026-03 — Artificial Intelligence and the Alleviation of Labor Market Mismatch: Evidence from Online Job Matching Data conditionally accepted at China Economic Quarterly.
• 2026-01 — Understanding Social Protection in Vulnerable Regions: Evidence from Ethiopia’s PSNP (with Assefa) published in China Economic Journal, 19(1): 88–103.