Jing Liu

Welcome to my website! I am currently Assistant Professor in Education Policy at the University of Maryland College Park. I am also a research affiliate to the IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Named as a National Academy of Education Sciences/Spencer Dissertation Fellow, I earned my Ph.D. in Economics of Education from Stanford University in 2018. Before I joined UMD, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute.

My research uses rigorous quantitative evidence to evaluate and inform education policies at the national, state, and local levels, with the goal of improving learning opportunities for historically marginalized students in urban areas. My work broadly engages with critical policy issues including student absenteeism, exclusionary discipline, educator’s labor market, school reform, and higher education. Grounded in economic theory and policy analysis, I use both quasi-experimental designs and data science methods such as computational linguistic analysis to analyze large administrative data and unstructured information. Most of my current projects focus on understanding the development of student engagement, behavior, and social emotional skills, how these skills and dispositions contribute to student success in the short and long run, and what the implications are for improving equal educational opportunities. My work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Education Finance and Policy, and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.