Shaoda Wang Named 2026 Sloan Research Fellow

Assistant Professor Shaoda Wang has been selected as a 2026 Sloan Research Fellow, one of the most prestigious honors available to early-career scholars in the social sciences and sciences.

Awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Sloan Research Fellowship recognizes outstanding early-career researchers whose work demonstrates exceptional creativity and promise. Fellows receive a two-year, $75,000 grant that can be used flexibly to advance their research programs. The 2026 cohort includes 126 scholars from leading institutions across the United States and Canada, including eight from the University of Chicago.

Wang’s research spans development economics, environmental economics, and political economy, with a regional focus on China. He investigates how political institutions shape policy design, implementation, and outcomes, and the implications for economic performance, environmental regulation, and governance.

A notable strand of his work explores the political economy of environmental regulation to understand how incentives faced by officials and citizens influence regulatory enforcement and environmental quality. Wang conducted one study in this area that provided one of the first rigorous estimates of the overall costs of environmental regulation in China.

Another strand of his research examines how authoritarian governments engage in policy learning and policymaking, given their institutional and bureaucratic characteristics. He studies the mechanisms and implications of China’s policy experimentation, as well as the country’s shift toward more centralized policymaking over the past decade and its associated consequences.

In addition to his faculty role at Harris, Wang serves as Deputy Faculty Director of the Energy Policy Institute at UChicago (EPIC-China), helping to advance interdisciplinary research on energy and environmental policy relevant to China and beyond. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

“I’m deeply honored to receive the Sloan Research Fellowship,” Wang said. “This support will help advance bold questions about how political institutions influence economic and environmental outcomes, and I hope it will inspire more students to engage with open questions in the Chinese political economy. I’m grateful to my colleagues, collaborators, and students at Harris, EPIC, across the University of Chicago, and beyond for their partnership and support of my work.”

Wang plans to use the grant to further advance his ongoing research agenda on the role of firms in China’s policymaking process, including how they shape environmental regulations and industrial standards—an important black box whose unraveling is essential to deepening our understanding of the country’s political economy.

Wang joined the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy after completing his undergraduate studies at Peking University, his doctoral training at UC Berkeley, and a postdoctoral fellowship in UChicago’s Department of Economics and EPIC.

In 2022, Harris' Peter Ganong was selected as a Sloan Research Fellow for his research in public economics, which examines how federal policies affect households facing financial challenges, including the effects of unemployment insurance and pandemic-era policy interventions.