Lin Tian

Lin Tian is an Assistant Professor of Economics at INSEAD. She holds a Bachelor degree in Economics and Statistics, and a Master degree in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University. She earned her PhD in Economics from Columbia University.

Professor Tian's research interests include international trade, economic geography, urban economics and public finance. Her current research focuses on studying the factors that contribute to the uneven distribution of economic activities across space. More specifically, she studies the importance of firms’ internal organization, e.g., worker specialization, to the spatial parity in economic development. She also investigates how and why regions vary in their adjustment to changes in local labor-market conditions, such as immigration shocks. In addition, she also studies trade tax in developing countries. In her research, she combines applied theories with well-identified empirical analyses that carefully separate the hypothesized mechanism from confounding factors.

Prior to graduate school, she worked as an urban planner at the Urban Redevelopment Authority, Singapore. Apart from doing research, she partakes in marathons and scuba diving.