About Me

I’m a fourth-year Ph.D. student in economics at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to Pitt, I obtained my B.A. in economics and B.S. in mathematics at Wuhan University. My CV is here. My email address is yuq23@pitt.edu.
My research interests lie in development economics, labor economics, and political economy. I’m also broadly interested in other applied research topics.
The pronunciation of my name can be found here.

Research

Working Papers

“Building Through Downturns: Export Slowdown and Construction in China”
[ Abstract ]

This paper studies how city governments in China use construction job creation to address the mid-2010s export slowdown, which significantly reduced manufacturing employment, and explores its longer-term effects. I document that cities more exposed to the export slowdown experienced an increase in construction employment. This effect is particularly prominent in cities under leaders with stronger career incentives, as construction employment creation is associated with higher promotion probabilities. One mechanism to create construction projects is through government land sales: (i) residential and commercial land sales bring real estate projects, and (ii) land sales revenue finance infrastructure projects. However, in the longer term, this land sales strategy is associated with housing oversupply and higher real estate risks.
“From Settlement to Stability: The Political Impact of Relaxing Migration Barriers in China”
with Weizheng Lai
[ Abstract ]

There are growing concerns that relaxed migration policy may undermine social stability. We study this issue by estimating the causal effect on labor unrest of China's recent reform to its internal migration institutions, which facilitated permanent settlement for migrants in small and medium sized cities. Exploiting variation due to the reform's population cutoff rule, we find that the reform significantly reduced labor unrest. We suggest that one important mechanism behind our finding is the enhancement of migrants' settlement intentions, which makes migrants less engaged in unrest to secure the opportunity of settlement offered by the reform. We provide evidence that the reform increased migrants' likelihood of remaining in their destinations. Through a novel causal mediation analysis, we find that heightened settlement intentions can explain 61 percent of decreased labor unrest due to the reform in the immediate term and 27 percent in the long term. We find no evidence that the reform led to compositional changes among migrants, delivery of benefits to migrants, or tighter government social control. Our results highlight how migration policy can influence stability by shaping migrants' attachment to their destinations.

Publication

“Are More Children Better than One? Evidence from a Lab Experiment of Decision Making”
with Xun Li
China Economic Review, Volume 69, October 2021
[ Abstract ]

This paper examines the impacts of siblings on people's social preference, risk attitude and time preference with a data set from a large-scale lab experiment. Employing the variation of fine rates under One-Child Policy for excess birth in different regions as instrument to address the endogeneity of whether having siblings, we find that sibling's role mainly focuses on shaping people's social preference that subjects with siblings demand less as responders in ultimatum game and behave more cooperatively in sequential prisoner's dilemma. This conclusion survives through several robustness checks. Our further result suggests that more sibling interactions and less parental expectations are two potential mechanisms through which siblings play a role in making people more prosocial. Our findings point to a positive externality along with Two-Child Policy which is widely neglected in both policy evaluation and relevant theory such as quantity-quality theory, and provide implications for the fertility policy such as the recent Three-Child Policy in China and beyond.

Work In Progress

“The Shattered Iron Rice Bowl and Youth’s College Decision: Evidence from China’s State-owned Enterprises Reform”
[ Abstract ]

How would a public sector downsizing reform affect the educational investment of potential job market entrants? This paper empirically investigates this question through the lens of China's state-owned enterprises reform (SOE reform) starting in 1998, which led to a substantial reduction in SOE employment. Leveraging regional and cohort variations in the SOE reform, my difference-in-differences estimate shows that the SOE reform significantly increases the likelihood of high school graduates obtaining a college degree. I provide evidence that this increase in college attainment after the reform can be attributed to the SOE reform's impact on increasing the likelihood of college graduates being employed and the college wage premium. Furthermore, the increase in college graduates’ likelihood of being employed is observed in both the state and non-state sectors, while the increase in the college wage premium is primarily attributed to the non-state sector.