Research

Work in Progress

Presentation: AFA 2025 Annual Meeting: Finance, Development, and Growth
Abstract: This paper studies the interaction between the sectoral allocation of credit and long-run economic development. The starting point is a new set of Financial Kuznets Facts: as countries get richer, the share of manufacturing credit falls relative to value added, while the opposite is true for credit to the real estate sector. To jointly explain this structural transformation in credit markets and the real economy, we build a two-sector model with heterogeneous collateral constraints in which real estate output supports collateralized borrowing. In a quantitative calibration of our model, differences in sectoral productivity explain most of the structural change in the real economy, while the collateral constraints account more for structural change in credit markets. We provide empirical evidence supporting the relevance of these mechanisms and show that the share of manufacturing in outstanding credit is positively correlated with long-run growth. To understand the potential role of government interventions, we show that liberalizations of directed credit policies that channel credit to priority sectors are associated with a redistribution of credit from manufacturing to real estate. Taken together, our analysis suggests that financial frictions play an important role in structural transformation and long-run economic growth by influencing the allocation of credit.

Presentation: NBER Investment in Early Career Scientists (Spring 2024)
Abstract: Scientific research is less likely to focus on women, despite the importance of such studies for women’s welfare. This paper studies the impact of increasing female representation in doctoral studies on the research direction of PhD students in the same cohort. We analyze the dissertation and research trajectories of nearly all US healthcare and biology PhD recipients from 1985 to 2015. By exploiting quasi-random year-to-year fluctuations in the female ratio at the PhD program level, we identify the causal impact of female peers on the production of gender-related research, defined as research studying or relating to women, gender, and sex. We find that an increase in female students in a cohort encourages female PhD students to conduct more gender-related research, but discourages male PhD students from engaging in such research. Furthermore, the positive spillover effects on conducting gender-related research observed among female students are primarily attributed to collaborations and informal interactions with female peers. Conversely, the diminished or negative effects seen in male students appear to stem from competitive pressures. Taken together, our findings suggest peer effect is an important factor to resolve the scarcity-substance puzzle of gender-related research production.

Abstract: This paper documents the relation between childlessness (the extensive margin of fertility) and development leveraging household surveys from 78 countries over all income level. Childlessness rate displays a U-shaped relationship with development, and accounts for 1/3 of global fertility variation. Females are selected into childlessness differently across countries, mostly explained by the differences in childlessness-age profiles. I disentangle age, cohort and year effect, finding that females in richer countries delay their fertility due to career costs stem from life-cycle wage growth. A model is developed to highlight counterbalancing forces for fertility delay and motives for childlessness and to explain these empirical findings jointly.

Outstanding Undergraduate Research (Peking University, 2021); Chancellor’s Undergraduate Research Funds in Economics (Peking University, 2019-2020)
Abstract: Using China Household Income Survey data, I document an inverse U-shaped income and a declining remittance profile over life cycle for rural-to-urban migrants to their family members left in the rural sector. I formulate and calibrate a life-cycle model with agents heterogeneous in demographical characteristics, making migration and remittance decision, motivated by the altruism to family members. I identify a huge migration cost associated with land, a fixed benefit of living in the urban and an exogenous exit rate out of urban. My decomposition exercise indicates that evolution of household characteristics is determinant for declining remittance over ages. Policy related counterfactual analysis suggests abolishing land associated cost and exogenous exit from urban result in migration rates of 12.87% and 83.31% respectively compared with current rate of 27.51%.