Tao Zha

Tao Zha is an economist whose research focuses on macroeconomics, econometrics, financial economics, and the Chinese economy. He is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Economics at Emory University and executive director of the Center for Quantitative Economic Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Zha was a Wim Duisenberg Research Fellow at the European Central Bank in 2012. He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2017, a Fellow of the International Association for Applied Econometrics in 2019, and a Fellow of the Royal Economic Society in 2025.

Education

Zha received a BS in mathematics from Chengdu University of Technology in 1982 and an MA in statistics from Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in 1985. He received an MA in economics from Washington State University in 1988 and a PhD in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1992.

Career

Zha is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Economics at Emory University and is jointly affiliated with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

With Christopher A. Sims, Zha studied changes in United States monetary policy using a multivariate regime-switching model. Their article "Were There Regime Switches in U.S. Monetary Policy?" was published in the American Economic Review in 2006.

The study found evidence of changes in the U.S. monetary-policy rule but concluded that differences among the estimated regimes were not large enough to account for the rise and subsequent decline of inflation during the 1970s and 1980s.

Zha's 2008 article "Vector autoregressions", published in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, was included among the review articles in NobelPrize.org's further-reading material for the 2011 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, which was awarded to Sargent and Sims for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy.

Chinese economy

Zha has also studied monetary policy and the financial system in China. With Chen and Ren, he examined the relationship between monetary policy and shadow banking. Their article "The Nexus of Monetary Policy and Shadow Banking in China" was published in the American Economic Review in 2018.

The study found that contractionary monetary policy during 2009–2015 increased shadow-banking lending, offsetting part of the expected decline in traditional bank lending.

Honors and recognition

In 2012, Zha was a Wim Duisenberg Research Fellow at the European Central Bank. The ECB describes the fellowship program as being aimed at senior professionals from academia, central banks, and research institutions who are internationally recognized experts in their fields.

Zha was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2017.

He was elected a Fellow of the International Association for Applied Econometrics in 2019.

In 2025, he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Economic Society.

Selected works