Ningzi Li

Biography

Ningzi Li is a professional research specialist at the Data Science Insitute (DSI) and adjunct assistant professor at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. She studies communication and behaviors in organizations.

A first stream of her research emphasizes how organizations use language to gain a competitive advantage in different contexts such as earnings conferences, entrepreneurial pitches, and sustainability reports. She views language as an essential tool that firms use to gain the support of various stakeholders, expanding the behavioral theory of the firm. A second stream examines language as an artifact of organizational culture and cognition. She studies the relationship between a firm's culture, managerial cognition, and financial decisions in the contexts of employee reviews and product recalls. Her analyses build on natural experiments and natural language processing tools. 

Li earned a doctoral degree in sociology from Cornell University and received B.A. in sociology and economics from Tsinghua University. Prior to joining UofC, she taught at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder.