​​Dr. Du is an economist with expertise in labor economics, computational economics, public finance, and macroeconomics. 

​Dr. Du’s research focuses on developing rich models of unemployment and income risk using advanced computational methods. In one paper, conditionally accepted at Quantitative Economics, Dr. Du and his co-authors build a model of consumption and unemployment risk to demonstrate that unemployment benefit extensions generate more stimulus and greater welfare gains compared to stimulus checks and tax cuts. 

​In other work, Dr. Du applies machine learning methods to impute households’ perceptions of their risk of unemployment and to generate real-time machine forecasts of the true risk of unemployment that households face. In particular, he shows that households’ perception of their risk of unemployment underreacts in response to changes in their actual risk. 

​ ​Before joining Secretariat, Dr. Du worked as a PhD intern at the Bank of England and as a developer for an economic modeling python package. He also served as a teaching assistant and section instructor at Johns Hopkins University.​