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BiographyDr. Yi, Junjian
I did not formally enroll in either high school or college. Prior to entering graduate school, I completed most high school and college courses through independent study, including such courses as economics, calculus, linear algebra, probability theory, statistics, English, and ancient Chinese literature, among others.
I was born in 1978 and had grown up in a small village in Hunan, an inland Chinese province. In 1990, I entered the No. 1 Middle School in Xiangxiang City after having completed primary school in the village. However, family budget constraints proved an obstruction. After graduating from middle school in 1993, I chose to study in a technical school, Yiyang Marketing (gong xiao) School, rather than in a regular high school. At age 18, I began working as a salesman for a state-owned beer enterprise in my hometown, Xiangxiang Beer Co. Ltd. I won the Distinguished Employee award in 1996 and 1997. I continued selling beer for the company for the next few years. Finally, in 2002, I resigned.
During most of my years in technical school and throughout my tenure as a salesman, I registered for the National Self-Taught Higher Education Examinations. I bought textbooks, studied during my free time, and took examinations twice a year at weekends. With years of self-study, I managed to obtain an associate college diploma in 1997. Four years later, in 2001, I received my college diploma. In both cases, I majored in marketing. I subsequently took the National Post-graduate Entrance Examination. I passed and enrolled in the School of Economics at Zhejiang University as a full-time post-graduate student in 2002. After obtaining an M.A. degree in economics in 2005, I continued to pursue my M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in economics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I received these degrees in 2007 and 2011, respectively.
I have been a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago since 2011, where I have been jointly sponsored by two Nobel laureates in economics, Professors James J. Heckman and Gary S. Becker. My fields of interest include labor and demographic economics and economic development. In particular, I have been conducting research on three major topics in recent years: (1) family behavior, human capital, and inequality; (2) demographic transitions; and (3) the Chinese economic transition from the human capital perspective. I am one of the core members responsible for the Longitudinal Chinese Child Twin Survey (LCCTS) project. The project began in 2002 and is the first of its kind around the world. LCCTS data collection is expected to spawn a series of scientific research papers over the next few years. My recent works have appeared in Review of Economics and Statistics, Demography, and Economic Inquiry.
http://home.uchicago.edu/junjian/bio.html
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