​​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, he builds a general equilibrium 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 related work, published as a Bank of Canada Staff Working Paper, Dr. Du employs machine learning methods to impute households’ perceptions of their risk of unemployment and to generate real-time machine forecasts of the actual risk of unemployment. His findings reveal a systematic underreaction: households tend to adjust their perceptions sluggishly in response to changes in their true unemployment 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.​