RUIXUE JIA is an Associate Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where she co-directs UCSD’s China Data Lab. She is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Her research interests lie at the intersection of economics, history, and politics, with a particular focus on the politics and economics of China’s education system.

Born in 1984 during China’s one-child policy era, Ruixue was given up for adoption after birth and raised by a family in a rural village. Before moving to Beijing for her undergraduate studies, she had never left her county. While her trajectory was largely shaped by China’s education system, she considers her experience an outlier – most of the girls with whom she grew up remain in her village today, while most of the boys become migrant workers, an observation that has motivated her to understand the complexity of the system. Ruixue received her Ph.D. in economics from Stockholm University in 2013 and has since taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science and UCSD. She has published numerous articles in leading economics journals, including the American Economic Review: Insights, Econometrica, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. She also serves on the editorial boards of several journals. As co-director of UCSD’s China Data Lab, she is working to lead China studies into a new era where contextual knowledge about China is tested and corroborated by social scientific methods and data. She is a co-author of Exam Empire (Harvard University Press).