Yan completed her PhD in economics from the University of Minnesota, having completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in China. Prior to coming to Rochester, Yan was a visiting scholar at Princeton University and an assistant professor at Arizona State University. Yan’s research focuses on international macroeconomics, and she has written a number of papers on the role that barriers to financial investment have on international capital flows and business cycles. Her most recent work examines the role of uncertainty in why employment drops so much during economic downturns—a key puzzle for the great recession and the disappointing recent recovery.