Zhixiu Yu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, E. J. Ourso College of Business, Louisiana State University. Yu was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a visiting research fellow at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School during 2022-2023.

Yu's research focuses on macroeconomics, labor, and public finance, including topics such as health inequality, social insurance, and digital currencies. She is interested in how social insurance programs and taxation affect the economic decisions of households, particularly those involving labor supply and saving behavior. Her research primarily combines rigorous structural models, rich microdata, econometric methods, and large-scale simulations to answer policy-relevant questions.

Yu earned her B.S. in Economics (with honors) and B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Washington in 2015 and her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Minnesota in 2022.