Short Biography
Tao Zha is Executive Director of the Center for Quantitative Economic Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Josh Resnick Distinguished Professor of Economics at Emory University, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He was elected Scientific Program Chair for the 2026 North American Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society (NASMES). He was Inaugural Distinguished Professor at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University (2016–2017), and is a visiting scholar and advisor at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
His research spans macroeconomics, financial economics, econometrics, and the Chinese economy. In 2012, he received the Wim Duisenberg Research Fellowship from the European Central Bank (ECB). His work in macroeconomic and econometric methodology has been supported by multiple National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, and his research on the Chinese economy was featured in the 2024 NBER Reporter.
Dr. Zha served as coeditor of Quantitative Economics from 2018 to 2022 and on the editorial boards of Econometrica, Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, and Journal of Econometrics. His research has appeared in leading academic journals, including American Economic Review, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Finance, Journal of Economic Literature, and Journal of Monetary Economics. Three of his articles were cited by the Nobel Prize Committee in Economic Sciences in 2011.
Dr. Zha was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2017 and a Fellow of the International Association for Applied Econometrics in 2019. In 2025, a panel chaired by Nobel Laureate Sir Christopher Pissarides selected him as a Fellow of the Royal Economic Society (FREcon).
He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and two master’s degrees, one in statistics and one in economics. He completed his PhD in economics at the University of Minnesota in 1992, supported by the Walter Heller Fellowship for Public Policy, with doctoral research conducted in part at Yale University (1990–1992).