Li Shen · Ph.D. in Economics
I study how trade, market connections, and prices shape regional economies and business decisions. My work combines quantitative spatial models, econometrics, and large datasets to examine economic mechanisms and evaluate alternative scenarios.
Alongside my research on trade and market integration, I develop tools for demand estimation, pricing, and forecasting.
Research papers
Why do similar export shocks have different local effects? A quantitative spatial model connects regional production networks, service demand, and labor mobility.
With Kensuke Suzuki, Xiaocong Xu, and Junfu Zhang.
Research on the relationship between passenger connectivity and wholesale vegetable price dispersion across Chinese cities.
Geospatial evidence on how population concentration and settlement patterns changed across China.
Applied projects
Demand estimation, pricing simulations, constrained optimization, and experimental validation plans using retail scanner data.
Historical price forecasts, risk signals, and comparisons with simple baselines, including fallback decisions when a model performs poorly.
A map-based companion to the population research, built from annual geospatial data.
Blog
Methods
Quantitative spatial equilibrium, input-output analysis, panel econometrics, demand estimation, forecasting, and geospatial measurement.
I work with retail scanner panels, wholesale prices, mobility records, trade and production data, and population rasters using Python, SQL, Stata, MATLAB, and R.
Teaching and background
At Clark University, I supported graduate finance and undergraduate economics courses as a teaching assistant from 2020 to 2025.
My work has received the Sheftel Award for Research Excellence and the Veendorp Best Field Paper Award. I also contributed to teams awarded silver and bronze medals in Kaggle competitions.
Teaching experience → Economist CV →