Professor Peter Lorentzen is a member of the Economics Department at the University of San Francisco and director of the Master’s of Science in Applied Economics. He was previously on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, and has also taught at Stanford University.
His research concerns the economics of information, incentives, organizations, and institutions, primarily as applied to the development and governance of China. He has written on anti-corruption campaigns, media control, environmental transparency, popular protest, rights consciousness, and the relationship of adult mortality to long-run economic growth, among other topics. This research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, the China Quarterly, Genetics in Medicine, the Journal of Economic Growth, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Theoretical Politics, Modern China, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and World Development. It has also been featured in popular media outlets including the Boston Review, California Magazine, The Diplomat, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books blog, and Slate. He is the co-author of two Stanford Graduate School of Business case studies on China’s high-tech sector.
He is a Non-Resident Scholar at the 21st Century China Center at UC San Diego and a member of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations. He has also been a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Fulbright Scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
He earned his PhD in Economic Analysis and Policy from Stanford University Graduate School of Business and his BA in Asian Studies from Dartmouth College. He has also studied at the London School of Economics, Beijing Normal University, National Taiwan University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Prior to joining academia, he worked as a China market-entry-strategy consultant in Hong Kong and Shanghai, and published with the Economist Intelligence Unit.