Qianmiao (Michelle) Chen

Governments spend about one-eighth of global GDP buying goods, services, and public works. I study how that money is spent, and how it could be spent better. My research is on government expenditure and public financial management, with a focus on public procurement from every angle: collusion and corruption, competition, industrial policy and its effects on firms, the adoption of e-procurement, and savings for taxpayers.

I bring together rich administrative data from multiple sources, including tender records, firm registries, and tax and invoice data, and analyze them with reduced-form methods, tools from industrial organization, and randomized controlled trials. My work spans Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Ghana, Kazakhstan, Peru, Romania, and other countries.

I received my Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2024.