Lei Li holds the professorship in Economics and Politics of China (Professur für Wirtschaft und Politik Chinas) at the Faculty of Business and Economics and the Faculty of Humanities at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Before joining the University of Göttingen in 2024, she was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Mannheim.

Her research fields are international trade and labor economics. In particular, her research focuses on two topics. Firstly, she studies the labor market consequences of globalization, with a special focus on technological change, wage inequality, human capital accumulation, migration, and health. Secondly, she evaluates the economic impacts of trade policies. More recently, she has been studying the tariff incidence during the US-China trade dispute.

She holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Tsinghua University, where she studied between 2011 and 2016. Prior to joining the Ph.D. program, she completed a B.S. in Finance at Beihang University in 2011.

Lei Li joined IZA as a Research Affiliate in February 2019.