In 2013, Li was appointed the founding dean of the Schwarzman Scholars program at Tsinghua University.

[1][2] Li Daokui is a part of an academic trio that replaced Fan Gang to the Monetary Policy Committee of the People's Bank of China (PBOC), China's central bank.

These include a visiting scholarship at the Center for International Development (CID) of the Harvard Kennedy School (1986), assistant professor at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, research fellow at the Hoover Institute of Stanford University, and professor and deputy director of the Economic Development Research Center of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

[citation needed] From 2016 to 2018, Li was a member of the monetary policy committee of China's central bank.

[7] In 2023, a study by Li concluded that local government debt in China was 50% higher than previously estimated by the IMF and World Bank.