(Bloomberg) -- David Dollar, a China scholar, commentator and former Treasury Department envoy to Beijing during President Barack Obama’s administration, has died, the Brookings Institution announced. No age or cause of death were provided.

Dollar served as World Bank country director for China and Mongolia between 2004 and 2009, part of a more than 20-year career at the development bank. His research focused on Chinese economic reform and globalization. Previously, he was an assistant professor at the University of California Los Angeles.

He was a senior fellow at Washington-based Brookings, which he joined in 2013 and where he hosted a podcast on the global trading system and its impact.

Dollar was “simply exceptional,” and was recognized as “a leading expert and well-regarded scholar of the Chinese economy and US-China economic relations,” Brookings interim President Amy Liu said in a statement.

Read more: US-China Trade Is Near a Record, Defying Talk of Decoupling

Dollar received a PhD in economics from New York University. He is survived by his wife and two children, Evan and Isabel. 

--With assistance from Scott Lanman.

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