Lei Zhang

About

Lei Zhang is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of economics at the School of Economics of Zhejiang University. Her primary research area is public economics, with a special interest in the economics of education. Her research spans important areas of how policies affect individuals’ educational achievement and how education and human capital affect individual economic outcomes and aggregate economic performance, including economic growth and income distribution.

Her current research focuses on questions related to China’s higher education expansions since the late 1990s and China’s urban-rural disparities in education finance and education quality and their ramifications.

Zhang was previously a professor of economics at the Antai College of Economics and Management of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and an assistant professor of economics at Clemson University. She was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow and the John Stauffer National Fellow in Public Policy at the Hoover Institution in 2007–8.

She has published in the Economic Journal, the Journal of Human Resources, the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of Human Capital, the Journal of Law and Economics, and Economic Development and Cultural Change, among journals.

She is a distinguished graduate of Peking University, China, where she received a BA in economics. She received her PhD in economics from Stanford University.