Ernest Liu
Ernest Liu is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance at the Woodrow Wilson School and at the Simpson Center in the Economics Department. His research studies the implications of weak financial institutions for economic growth, allocation of resources, and economic development. He has done work that uses production network theory to understand industrial policies, specifically, the strong government support for upstream industries that are widely adopted in developing economies. His other work shows low long-term interest rates lead to high market concentration and slow productivity growth and that financial market imperfections not only distort economic allocations via underinvestment but may have amplifying effects because of the interactions across economic sectors or because the relationships between borrowers and lenders create underdevelopment traps. He received his PhD in Economics from MIT in 2017.
Ernest Liu