Welcome!

I am a first-year finance PhD student at MIT Sloan School of Management, where I previously worked as a Predoc fellow. I obtained my MA in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2022, and my BA in Economics and Literature from Peking University, China, in 2021. Here is my CV.

My research lies at the intersection of finance, macroeconomics, and development. Methodologically, I leverage large-scale granular data, conduct reduced-form analysis with causal identification, and combine it with quantitative models to disentangle potential channels.

Work in Progress

Structural Transformation, Finance, and Growth (with Karsten Müller and Emil Verner) (Draft Available Soon)

• 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. We document a new set of Financial Kuznets Facts. As countries grow richer, (i) the share of manufacturing credit relative to value added falls, (ii) the share of credit to real estate relative to value added rises, and (iii) real estate prices and the importance of real estate collateral increase. We build a two-sector supply-side structural change model with heterogeneous collateral constraints to rationalize these patterns. The model implies that loosening financial constraints in the real estate sector plays an important role in structural change in credit markets. We further show that the share of manufacturing in credit predicts higher long-run growth, while the opposite is true for the share of real estate credit, consistent with theories where financing manufacturing has positive spillovers for growth. Governments have historically used directed credit policies channel credit to “priority sectors”, especially manufacturing. We find that the liberalization of these credit policies is associated with a significant reallocation of credit from manufacturing to real estate. Taken together, our analysis suggests that financial frictions and government policy play a role in structural transformation and long-run economic growth by influencing the allocation of credit.

Pre-PhD Research

Peers Matter: The Heterogeneous Effects of Female Peers on Scientists’ Research Focus (with Hongyuan Xia)

• 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.

Childlessness and Development

• 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.

Life-Cycle Remittance of Rural-to-Urban Migrants

• 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%.