林明仁 Ming-Jen Lin

橫跨生物、社會、資料科學 深究臺灣經濟問題

As an applied micro economist, I started my career from the fields of labor economics, economics of crime, health economics and development economics. Recently, political economics and data science/digital economics are also on my radar. In the past 22 years, I have published 28 papers in English, including 1 excellent (American Economic Review), 4A+ (J. of Human Resources, J. of European Economic Association, International Economic Review, and J. of Development Economics) according to NSTC ECON journal ranking, and two in interdisciplinary journals: Nature Communication and PNAS Nexus, and 8 in Chinese. As a freakonomist, I especially focus on telling a coherent story which can align economic theory with data in a causal sense, and often put in the flavor of gender or other social issues into it. My objective is to find an interesting and/or important question, academically and/or policy-wise, and then use a valid identification strategy to identify it in a causal way. And the results of my research can often serve as the evidence base evaluation of the policy. Most of my papers study social and economic issues in Taiwan.

There are also three different ingredients in my research: (1) a strong interdisciplinary perspective to biology and sociology, (2) use of administrative data, and finally, (3) integrating Data Science approach. However, the objective is still to identify the causal mechanism on how a biological social, or policy shock affects human behavior.