Dr. Lin is Professor of Economics and Professor of Mathematical Finance at the Belk College of Business. His research interests lie at the intersection of technological innovation, economic growth, international trade, and computational economics. He is a trailblazer in some areas of economic research. His research introduces Forward-rate Target Zones designed to stabilize foreign exchange rates and has been recognized with a Best Paper Award at the Belk College of Business.
He has pioneered research into pro-innovation mechanisms that beat patent systems using dynamic general-equilibrium growth models. In this line of research, he has demonstrated that his novel design to incentivize innovation — coined “Innovation-backed Amortizing Securities” — can be a Pareto-efficient alternative to patents. This novel design can replace medical patents to resolve social problems with hefty drug prices.
His research has also contributed to computational economics. For example, he introduces novel methods — relaxation and Homotopy continuation — for numerically solving macroeconomic dynamics driven by mixed-typed functional differential equations (FDEs). These contributions can resolve a critical computational problem that has bothered economists for decades.
Currently, he has an ongoing project aimed to develop a dynamic general-equilibrium North-South model to study the globally-optimal shape of patents for developed and developing countries. This project is to present valuable insights into the optimality of the world’s patent system in the three dimensions: patent length, patent breadth, and patent height.
Dr. Lin is a seasoned expert in solving general-equilibrium macro-dynamical systems numerically. He enjoys programming in Python, C/C++, and Fortran.