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. A growing part of it measures how artificial intelligence is reshaping work: with coauthors I built a task-based index of occupational exposure to large language models for China from 1.25 million job postings, released it as public data, and use it to trace AI’s effects on labor demand and on the quality of job matching. 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
- 2026-07 — Motivate Future Doctors: Evidence from a Large-Scale Online Experiment in China (with Li, Ma, Wu, and Ye) received a Revise & Resubmit at China Economic Review.
- 2026-05 — Artificial Intelligence and the Alleviation of Labor Market Mismatch: Evidence from Online Job Matching Data published in China Economic Quarterly, 26(3): 874–894.
- 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).