Xiaohong Chen, a renowned scholar who has made fundamental contributions to econometric methods, has been named the Tjalling C. Koopmans Professor of Economics, effective July 1.
She is a member of the Department of Economics in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and has an appointment at Yale School of Management and a secondary appointment in the Department of Statistics & Data Science in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She joined the Yale faculty in 2007.
In 2014 she was appointed as the Malcolm K. Brachman Professor.
Chen has made fundamental contributions to econometric methods and is particularly known for her research in penalized sieve estimation and inference on semiparametric and nonparametric models, such as semiparametric models of nonlinear time series, empirical asset pricing, copula, missing data, measurement error, causal inference, nonparametric instrumental variables, nonparametric quantile instrumental variables, semi/nonparametric conditional moment restrictions, and heterogenous agent functional vector autoregressive models.
Her work on sieve methods for semiparametric and nonparametric models has made the use of flexible functional forms feasible for a wide variety of empirical applications in economics. Much of this work is focused on models with endogenous variables, which are ubiquitous in economic applications, but are difficult to analyze in semiparametric and nonparametric scenarios. She has also made important contributions to nonclassical measurement error methods, copula methods in finance, and asset pricing models. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of which Chen has been an elected member since 2019, has written that her research is known for its originality, generality, and very high quality.
Chen has been recognized throughout her career for her contributions to the field of econometrics. In 2023 she was awarded a Distinguished Alumni award from her alma mater Wuhan University, and in 2017 she was a co-winner of the China Economics Prize. Her other awards include the Econometric Theory Multa Scripsit Award, the Richard Stone Prize in Applied Econometrics, and the Arnold Zellner Award in Theoretical Econometrics, among numerous others. She was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2007, has been a founding fellow of the International Association for Applied Econometrics since 2018, a Fellow of the Journal of Econometrics since 2012, a Fellow of Society of Financial Econometrics since 2024, and an international fellow of Cemmap (the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice) since 2007.
At Yale, Chen teaches advanced economics courses including "Financial Time Series Econometrics," "Econometrics III," and "Econometrics V." Chen has supervised many undergraduate and PhD thesis. Chen was the editor of the Journal of Econometrics and Foundations and Trends in Econometrics. She had served as the associate editor of the Review of Economic Studies, Econometrica, Quantitative Economics, the Journal of Econometrics, The Econometrics Journal, Journal of Econometric Methods, The Berkeley Journal of Time Series Econometrics, Econometric Theory, Annals of Economics, Journal of Nonparametric Statistics, and Finance and Frontiers of Economics in China.
Chen received her B.A. from Wuhan University, and her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego.
