A Little About Me

I was born in Bei’an, a small town in Heilongjiang in northeastern China, where snow and ice cover the ground for nearly half the year. I grew up amid the shift from an economy centered on state-owned enterprises toward one increasingly shaped by markets. The lasting effects of the mass layoffs of the 1990s were visible in families around me. They left me wanting to understand how changes in businesses could reshape people’s lives so profoundly.

Since then, I have spent substantial parts of my life in China, Europe, and the United States. Living in different societies has deepened that curiosity and made me less inclined to take any one way of organizing economic life for granted. My attention keeps returning to the relationship between firms and families: how a business’s decisions about its future become part of a family’s decisions about theirs.

This interest has led me to ask how people understand a business’s circumstances and what information they rely on when making decisions. Accounting gives me a way to explore these questions through what firms report about themselves and how that information is used, including in decisions about hiring and employment. I hope my research helps people see accounting as more than a record of business activity, by explaining its role in decisions that reach into everyday life. What makes this work meaningful to me is the possibility of contributing to better-informed decisions without losing sight of the people affected by them.