MELANIE MENG XUE
Assistant Professor of Economic History
London School of Economics
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom
Email: m.m.xue@lse.ac.uk
I am Assistant Professor of Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). My research interests include political economy, gender, folklore, and early modern and modern Chinese history.
My work examines gender inequality, authoritarian regimes, public goods provision, and affirmative action in a historical perspective. By tracing the impact of historical events over time and in various institutional settings, my work centers on the role of values, beliefs and norms in shaping economic and political disparities.
In my research of oral traditions, through analyzing folklore themes, I discovered traditional narratives are an important source of modern values. This line of inquiry has produced a global dataset of values and beliefs across countries and ethnicities. Full datasets are available here.