CV — Zichen Wang

Education

M.A. candidate in Economics expected Jul 2027

Institute of Economic and Social Research (IESR), Jinan University · Advisor: Shiyu Bo

B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics 2020–2024

University of Birmingham · First-Class Honours

B.A. in Economics 2020–2024

Jinan University · GPA 89/100 (3.91/5) · Jinan University–University of Birmingham Joint Institute (dual degree)

Research Interests

Text/image-as-data; LLMs as measurement tools; AI + Economics; applied microeconomics.

Working Papers

"Assessing the Quality of Personality Measures Generated by Large Language Models" ready for submission · PNAS

with Shuaizhang Feng, Yujie Han, and James J. Heckman

LLM-based Big Five ratings from student letters show internal consistency, construct validity, and predictive validity; in a multi-informant framework, LLM ratings have predictive power comparable to conventional human raters.

"The Effects of China–US Tensions on Science: Evidence from the arXiv Dataset" work in progress

with Shiyu Bo · first author

Continuous DID around Aug 2018: high overseas-Chinese-diaspora topics experienced a sharper citation decline with little drop in publication counts; mainland-author placebo shows no comparable effect.

Research Experience

Research Assistant (co-author), Shiyu Bo 2025.02–2025.11

Jinan University, IESR

Constructed a hospital-year panel linking ~20 million medical procurement records to medical litigation; classified records using CN-RoBERTa embeddings + LightGBM (CV accuracy >90%, F1 >85%).

Research Assistant, Zijian Wang / Jieran Wu / Cynthia Jing Wu 2024.10–2025.05

IESR / ZJU / UIUC & NBER

Fine-tuned FinBERT to construct firm-level measures of monetary-policy attention and financial constraints from SEC 10-K filings (124,208 firm-year observations); classifier achieves 90.75% accuracy vs. 87.60% dictionary baseline.

Projects

frowang.com 2024.12–present

Solo project · AI-native paper reading and research platform

360 registered users, 2,206 paper assets; web reader + Paper APIs connecting local agents (Codex, Claude Code) to personal paper libraries.

AI Econ Research Mentor Agent in development

Academic infrastructure for economics training

"Cyber mentor" built on ~40,000 papers from 30+ top journals; supports academic writing, method learning, topic discovery, and research mentoring via agentic search.

Skills