Zili Yang is a rising fifth-year PhD student in the department of economics at the University of Southern California. His research interests include Economic Growth, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship. His study often starts with some empirical work, combining patent & other micro datasets to describe some stylized facts & establish potential causal relations between innovation, entrepreneurship, & potential factors. He also combines the empirical results with growth models to study their impacts on economic growth. Zili holds a Master of Science in quantitative Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.