She is also an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) and a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). She specializes in development economics and labor economics with a focus on microeconomic issues related to property rights and migration. While much of her research is on China, she has also examined questions in India, and the United Arab Emirates. Her research has appeared in leading academic journals, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economics and Statistics and the American Economic Journal: Applied Micro.