Dr Lefan Liu

• Associate Fellow of HEA, 2019 
• PhD in Economics, University of Nottingham, UK, 2016
• MA in Applied Economics, Hunan University, China, 2011
• BA in Public Finance, Hunan University, China, 2009

Lefan joined the University of Birmingham as a research fellow in July 2023. Previously, she was working in China with a teaching role at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (2015-2023).

She did her PhD at the School of Economics, University of Nottingham, UK 2011-2016. During her PhD, she studied the health of the elderly living in China using household panel data - China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). Her recent research work looks at health literacy (e.g., do people learn from their chronic diseases), patient trust in physicians (e.g., do people’s health utilization experience change their trust in doctors), and smoking (e.g., do smoking and drinking place a penalty on income). She is interested in using data to inform public policy to promote population health. She likes the notion of “thinking in reverse” and how it can be applied in health and healthcare studies. Daniel Kahneman, the well-known behavior economist put it nicely: instead of asking, “How can I get him or her to do it?” it starts with a question of, “Why isn’t she doing it already?” More recently, she has been fascinated by the advances in causal inferences, including the graphical models (started by Judea Pearl).

Research interests

Health Economics, Applied Microeconometrics

Doctoral Research

Microeconomic Analyses of the Health of the Elderly in China (http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/33931/)

Current projects

• Family Group Conferencing in adult social care and mental health: exploring how it works and what difference it can make in people’s lives
• Public Trust in Physicians and the Role of Healthcare Utilization. We study the effects of health insurance on public trust in physicians.
• The relationship between health literacy and residents’ health outcomes and health behaviours, including chronic diseases and smoking. This is a collaborative project with researchers from Ningbo Municipal Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).