Ginger Zhe Jin

Ginger Zhe Jin was appointed the Director of the FTC's Bureau of Economics by Chairwoman Edith Ramirez on November 24, 2015. Assuming her director’s role on January 1, 2016, she supervises economic analysis at the FTC for both the antitrust and the consumer protection missions and advises the Commission on economic policy matters.

Jin is Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has served on the University of Maryland faculty for more than 15 years.

Most of Jin’s research focuses on information asymmetry among economic agents and ways to overcome the information problem. The applications she has studied include restaurant food safety, health insurance, prescription drugs, online trading, online reviews, regulatory inspection, scientific innovation, air quality, blood donation, and the intrafamilial interaction between parents and children. Her research has been published in economics, management and marketing journals, with support from the National Science Foundation, the Net Institute, and the Sloan Foundation. In October 2014, she co-founded Hazel Analytics, an analytics company that promotes the use of open government data.

Jin earned a doctorate in Economics from UCLA; a master’s degree in Economics from UCLA and the Graduate School of the People’s Bank of China; and a bachelor’s degree in Economic Management from the University of Science and Technology of China.