Ling Yao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota. Ling’s research lies at the intersection of agricultural and development economics, testing classic economic theories with cutting-edge empirical methods and data from unconventional sources, with the goal of informing policies related to food, agriculture, and the environment. Her job market paper uses web-scraped big data to investigate the relationship between agricultural mechanization and the structural transformation of employment, revealing gender-specific effects. She is also driven to improve quantitative tools used by agricultural economists through applied econometrics research.

Ling has worked as a teaching assistant for various undergraduate and graduate quantitative method courses. She was an adjunct instructor at St. Olaf College in Spring 2024.