Hangyu Chen

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About

Hangyu Chen is a rising scholar at the intersection of international trade, labor economics, and technological change, with a sharp focus on how automation and artificial intelligence reshape firm behavior and market outcomes. Her research systematically explores the nuanced effects of industrial robots and AI on China’s economy, revealing counterintuitive patterns that challenge simple linear narratives. In her highly cited 2023 study, Chen demonstrates that industrial robot adoption has a nonlinear “inverted U-shaped” relationship with export product quality in multi-product enterprises—meaning that while robots initially boost quality, excessive automation eventually undermines it. Her 2024 work on AI and wage inequality offers a timely corrective to fears of technology-driven disparity, showing that AI adoption actually narrows firms’ inner wage gaps, a finding with significant policy implications. Most recently, Chen has leveraged large language models to study how robot imports stimulate firm innovation, opening new methodological frontiers. With her work accumulating citations rapidly—including 17 and 11 citations for her flagship papers—Chen is establishing herself as a leading voice on the complex, often surprising, economic consequences of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the world’s largest manufacturing economy.