Melanie Meng Xue

Assistant Professor of Economics Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Email: melanie.xue@nyu.edu
Education: BA Fudan University; MA Claremont McKenna College; PhD George Mason University

Research Areas: Economic History; Political Economy

Melanie Meng Xue is an Assistant Professor of Economics at NYUAD. Before joining NYUAD, Melanie was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA and Northwestern.

Melanie’s research lies at the intersection of economic history and political economy. She has studied the rise of gender-equitable beliefs and the deterioration of social capital in the context of imperial China. By tracing the impact of historical events over time and in various institutional settings, her work isolates the role of values, beliefs, and norms in shaping economic and political disparities. Another strand of her research concerns the decoding of folklore and mythology as a new approach to understanding historical values.