About Me

I’m a fifth-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{at}pitt.edu.
My research interests lie in development economics, labor economics, economic history, and political economy.
The pronunciation of my name can be found here.

Research

Working Papers

“Building Jobs: Employment Stabilization and Construction in China”
[ Abstract ]

This paper studies construction as an employment stabilization tool and its longer-run consequences. Exploiting cross-city variation in exposure to China’s mid-2010s export slowdown, I find that more exposed cities experience substantial manufacturing employment losses followed by increases in construction employment. This construction response is stronger in cities led by officials with stronger career incentives and with larger increases in labor unrest, and it is accompanied by increased emphasis on employment in government work reports. Similar construction responses arise following automation shocks that displace manufacturing workers without reducing economic output, indicating construction expansion as a response to employment pressure. One mechanism to expand construction is through government land sales that facilitate real estate and infrastructure projects. While this strategy mitigates short-run employment losses, it is associated with higher real estate risk in the longer term.
“Migrant Integration and Social Stability: Evidence from China”
with Weizheng Lai
[ Abstract ]

Contemporary public discourse often raises concerns that migration may threaten social stability, fueling support for exclusionary integration policies. We study this issue by estimating the causal effect of China's recent reform of its internal migration institutions on labor unrest (e.g., strikes). Exploiting variation from the reform's population-based discontinuity rule, we find that the reform significantly reduced labor unrest. A key mechanism is migrants' enhanced settlement intentions: to secure the opportunity of settlement offered by the reform, migrants have weaker incentives to engage in unrest. We show that the reform increased the likelihood of migrants remaining in migration destinations, and through a novel causal mediation analysis, we find that enhanced settlement intentions can explain 63 percent of the reform's effect on labor unrest. Moreover, the reform's effect on labor unrest is more pronounced in places where migrants live closer to their origins or are culturally similar to natives, making them more inclined to stay once the reform lowers institutional integration barriers. We find no evidence that the reform changed migrant composition, significantly improved migrants’ wellbeing, or prompted governments to tighten social control.

Work in Progress

“Fathers in Offices, Sons in Jobs: Intergenerational Returns to Local Political Office”
“Representation and Resource Allocation Before and After the 17th Amendment”
with Noah Braun, Paige Montrose, and Lauren Olson

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.