Profile

Lei LEI is currently working as an Associate Professor at RIEM. She graduated from Tilburg University, Netherlands in 2020 with a PhD in Economics (supervisor: Arthur van Soest); prior to that, she held a Master's degree in Statistics from the Central University of Finance and Economics and a Bachelor's degree in Engineering from Wuhan University. Her main research areas include household finance and labor economics, with a long-term focus on household economic behavior under China's new demographic situation. This is dedicated to exploring the economic mechanisms of household decision-making in the context of population aging and low fertility rates. Her research findings have been published in famous international journals such as Research Policy, Journal of Banking and Finance and Health Economics. She has led several research projects, including those funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Ministry of Education's Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation. She also serves as a reviewer for academic journals such as World Economy, Journal of Labor Economics, and Social Science & Medicine.

Research Fields：

Household finance/economics, Health Economics of labor force, Public policy evaluation.

Research achievements（partly）

Publications：

§ "Child education and parental healthcare utilization: The roles of knowledge transfer and financial support", with Lingyan Hu, Arthur van Soest, and Yi Zhang, Health Economics (2025)

§ "Religiosity and Financial Distress of the Young", (with Weijie Lu, Geng Niu, Yang Zhou), Journal of Banking and Finance (2024), vol. 168, 107276

§ "Child Gender and Subjective Well-being of Older Parents in China", (with Fengyu Wu and Yiming Xia), Journal of Happiness Studies (2023), vol. 24, 2473–2497  

§ "Better Educated Children, Better Internet-Connected Elderly Parents", (with Dandan Yu and Yang Zhou), Research Policy (2023), vol. 52, 104743

Research Grants as Principal Investigator

§ National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No.72403205): Jan 2025 - now, Principal investigator

§ Ministry of Education's Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation, General Program, Program No.23YJC790057:  Sep 2023 - now, Principal investigator

§ Funding Projects of Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities (Project No. JBK2304118, JBK2101039): 2021-2023, Principal investigator

Conference Presentations：

2025: ES World Congress Seoul, EEA Bordeaux

2022: The 20th Quarterly Forum of Labor Economics Scholars, and the 5th China Residents' Income and Wealth Distribution Forum, AMES-CUHK Shenzhen, AMES-Tokyo

2021: SEHO-Boston, ESPE-Barcelona, iHEA, CMES-ShanghaiTech, EEA-Copenhagen, EALE-Padua, AASLE-Beijing

2020: EEA-Rotterdam, EEA WinE Workshop, ESPE-Barcelona, SEHO-Venice, International Symposium on Contemporary Labor Economics Guangzhou, International Symposium on Human Capital and Labor Markets, CHLR seminar

2019 and Earlier: AASLE-Singapore, Chinese Economists Society, SEG Tilburg, Brownbag Tilburg

Services：

§ Anonymous reviewer for Empirical Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Journal of Labor Economics, Social Science & Medicine, World Economy

§ Database expert of National Natural Science Foundation of China

§ Expert for Degree Review Center of Ministry of Education

§ Member of Scientific Committee of the International Conference on Health Economics (iHEA)