Yuan Xiao is a non-resident scholar with the Marron Institute. She is currently a postdoctoral research scholar at the Center for Global Legal Transformation of Columbia Law School, where she researches property rights in the context of rapid urbanization. Yuan’s research interests include urbanization in developing countries, land policy and land markets, and property rights theories. She graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning in 2014. Her dissertation investigates China’s land quota markets, a recent land policy innovation that virtually transfers urbanization permission from the countryside to cities. It is titled “Making Land Fly: The Institutionalization of China’s Land Quota Markets and Its Implications for Urbanization, Property Rights, and Intergovernmental Politics.” Before turning to academia, Yuan had worked with the World Bank between 2005­2008. She also holds a M. A. in Political Science from University of Toronto, and a B. A. in International Politics, and a B. A. in Economics from Peking University.