at the University of Texas at Austin in 2001 and a Ph.D. in economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005, where she was advised by Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Joshua Angrist.
[3] She (together with Xin Meng and Pierre Yared) also documents that the centrally planned grain procurement policy contributed to around half of the mortality during China's Great Famine.
Her extensive research in China led her to conclude that an increase in family size has a negative effect on child educational attainment, an issue that is specifically prevalent in developing countries.
Another influential study shows that U.S. food aid is largely driven by U.S. objectives and can lead to more conflict in recipient countries.
[6] A well-cited finding using historical data (together with Nathan Nunn) is that the introduction of the potato within the Columbian exchange may have been responsible for at least a quarter of the population and urbanisation growth observed in the Old World between 1700 and 1900.
[7] A paper with Nathan Nunn and Sandra Sequeira shows that historical immigration to the United States increased productivity and innovation.