Yingyao Hu

Hu has served as an associate editor of several leading economics journals, including Econometrics Journal, Econometrics Reviews, Frontiers of Economics in China, and Journal of Econometrics, and as a panelist of the National Science Foundation economics program. He is a member of editorial board of Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering. He was a co-editor (with Tom Wansbeek) of an Annals of Econometrics issue on measurement error models (a special issue of Journal of Econometrics), and a guest co-editor of China Economic Review (Virtual Special Issue: 2020 CES Conferences). Hu was a co-chair of program Committee for the 2019 China Meeting of the Econometric Society, a member of Scientific Committee of the International Symposium on Econometric Theory and Applications (SETA) from 2014 to 2017, a program committee member for the 2017 China Meeting of the Econometric Society, and a member of Board of Directors for the Chinese Economists Society.

Hu is a Research Fellow at IZA (2008 – present), a Fellow of the Journal of Econometrics (2013 – present), and a Fellow of the Global Labor Organization (2020 – present).

Hu was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin between 2003 and 2007. He joined the Department of Economics at the Johns Hopkins University as an assistant professor in 2007, got promoted to be an associate professor in 2011, and a full professor in 2015. Starting from 2019, Hu has served as the Chair of in the Department of Economics at the Johns Hopkins University.

Hu addressed the issue of misreporting in the Current Population Survey (CPS) and found that the official U.S. unemployment rate substantially underestimated the true level of unemployment. During the period from January 1996 to August 2011, the corrected monthly unemployment rates are between 1 and 4.4 percentage points (2.1 percentage points on average) higher than the official rates, and are more sensitive to changes in business cycles. In another paper, Hu studied the impact of hurricanes on the regional fertility rate in the U.S.; this paper won the 2013 Kuznets Prize for the best published article in the Journal of Population Economics during the period 2010 to 2012. More recently, Hu published a paper uncovering a more reliable estimate of China's unemployment rate.

Yingyao Hu 胡颖尧 (born 1972) is an econometrician, a professor of economics, and currently the Chair of the Department of Economics, Johns Hopkins University.

Hu was born in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR). His parents were among the 97,000 Shanghai zhiqing (知青), or zhishi qingnian (知识青年), “the educated youths,” mobilized by the Chinese state to migrate to the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (新疆生产建设兵团) from 1963 to 1966. Hu went to the elementary, middle, and high school in Xinjiang. He was admitted to the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University as the 14th highest scored students of Xinjiang in 1989. He graduated from Tsinghua University with a B.E. in 1994 and from Fudan University with a M.A. in 1997. He studied in the Department of Economics at Michigan State University for one year in 1998, and then transferred to the Johns Hopkins University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in economics (2003) and M.S.E. in Math Science (2001). His Ph.D. advisor is Geert Ridder.