Chih Ming Tan

Biography

Prof. Chih Ming Tan is a Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor and the Page Endowed Chair in Applied Economics at the Department of Economics & Finance, Nistler College of Business and Public Administration (NCoBPA), University of North Dakota. He is also the Associate Dean for Research at NCoBPA and has been in that role since October 2019. He previously served as the Director of the Master of Science in Applied Economics and Predictive Analytics (MSAEPA) program from October 2016 to July 2022.  

Prof. Tan received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004. He received his B.Sc. (First Class Honors) and M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK, in 1996 and 1997, respectively. Prior to joining UND, Prof. Tan taught in Massachusetts for nine years at Tufts University and Clark University. He has also worked as an Economic Analyst (NS) for the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Singapore.

Prof. Tan is a leading applied econometrician with research interests in the fields of inequality and mobility, economic growth & development, global health, and econometrics. He was an early proponent of applying machine learning methods to uncovering endogenous social groupings in redistribution preferences, convergence clubs in economic growth across countries, and, more recently, poverty traps in income mobility processes. His interest in global health is driven by the importance of early childhood health on the accumulation of human capital that, in turn, has deep implications for economic growth, inequality, and mobility. He was one of the first to investigate the impact of early exposure to famine on later life cognitive development in Sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana). He has since studied the long-run impact of early health shocks on later life cognitive and mental health outcomes in a variety of other settings (China, India, Indonesia, and Mexico). Prof. Tan has also made substantive contributions in econometric theory. He has taught macroeconomics and econometrics at the Ph.D. level and currently teaches the core advanced macroeconomics course, as well as a course on advanced program evaluation methods, in the MSAEPA program. 

Prof. Tan’s work has appeared in both leading general interest journals and top field journals including the Annual Review of Economics, Economic Journal, the European Economic Review, the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, the Journal of Population Economics, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Health Economics, Econometric Theory, the Journal of Applied Econometrics, the Oxford Bulletin of Economics & Statistics, the Journal of Macroeconomics, Empirical Economics, Economics and Human Biology, the Journal of Development Studies, the Economics Bulletin, the International Review of Economics and Finance, and others. 

Prof. Tan is an Associate Editor for the China Economic Review. He is an affiliate scholar of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago, a network member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group at the University of Chicago, and a senior fellow of the Rimini Center for Economic Analysis (RCEA) in Italy. Prof. Tan is a referee for numerous journals and has evaluated proposals for prestigious grant agencies, including the National Science Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada).