Jinhai Yu

Assistant Professor

School of Public Policy

Education

B.M., China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing, China, 2011
M.P.A., China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing, China, 2013
M.P.P., Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, University of Kentucky, 2014
Ph.D., Public Policy and Administration, Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, University
of Kentucky, 2018

Teaching & Research Interests

Public budgeting and capital financing
Financial transparency and accountability
Program evaluation

Dr. Jinhai Yu

Jinhai Yu is an Assistant Professor of Public Budgeting and Finance in the School of Public Policy at the University of Connecticut. His primary fields of research are public budgeting, municipal debt, and financial transparency. Specifically, his work examines how governments produce, disclose, and communicate financial information, and how that information shapes decisions by public organizations, bond markets, and citizens. He pursues two lines of research. The first uses experiments to study how the design of government financial reports affects citizen understanding, trust, and engagement. The second uses causal inference methods to study how fiscal performance systems, natural disasters, and institutional structures shape budgeting and borrowing decisions. He is currently working on a series of experiments examining citizen responses to popular financial reports and how school districts finance capital investments through the municipal bond market.

His work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Public Administration Review, National Tax Journal, Public Budgeting & Finance, Public Management Review, and Comparative Political Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration from the Martin School at the University of Kentucky.