I’m a Ph.D. candidate in economics at the University of Pittsburgh. My CV is here. My email address is yuq23{at}pitt.edu.

My research interests lie in labor, development, political economy, and economic history.

The pronunciation of my name can be found here.

I’m on the 2026-2027 job market.

Job Market Paper

• “Fathers in Offices, Sons in Jobs: Intergenerational Returns to Local Political Office”
  [ Abstract ]
  Presented at: AYEW, AMIE Workshop, BEDI Labor and Development Workshop, Cliometrics Conference (Logan), EUI PEARL Workshop, EALE Conference (Barcelona), EHA Conference (St. Louis)

  Can local political office shape access to better jobs, and how do constraints on hiring discretion affect these advantages? I study these questions using newly digitized rosters of Ohio township, village, and city officials linked to full-count U.S. censuses, and tracing their adult children from 1900 to 1940. Using a matched difference-in-differences design, I find that fathers' entry into office increases sons' occupational income and white-collar employment, with gains persisting for decades. In 1940, officials' sons earn about 13% more than their matched counterparts. Effects on daughters are more limited in this period of low female labor force participation. One important channel is better access to public employment, with larger effects where local officials have greater scope to influence hiring. Officeholding also increases sons' private-sector white-collar employment, particularly in sectors where relationships with local government may be valuable. Among city officials, merit-based civil service reform does not eliminate these advantages; instead, private-sector white-collar gains become larger when fathers enter office under civil service. Finally, I find suggestive evidence that greater representation of officials' sons in public employment is associated with higher local income inequality in smaller localities.
  
  

Working Papers

1. “Building Jobs: Employment Stabilization and Construction in China”
   [ Abstract ]
   Presented at: UEA North American Conference (DC, 2024), 23rd CEPR Summer School in International and Development Economics (Gargonza), SEA Conference (DC, 2024), CES North American conference (Lewisburg, 2024)
   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.
   
   

2. “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.
   
   

3. “Geopolitical Tensions and Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Japan”
   with Weizheng Lai
   [ Abstract ]

   Geopolitical tensions may reallocate economic opportunities across countries. We study the economic and political impacts of such shifts, drawing upon the Korean War (1950--1953), one of the most intense geopolitical conflicts in recent history. Using newly digitized data, we show that US military procurement in Japan during the Korean War led to employment growth, labor relocation, and increases in labor productivity in Japan. Meanwhile, we present suggestive evidence that military procurement reduced support for parties opposed to Japan's rearmament (and military alliance). Our findings suggest that geopolitical tensions may generate economic opportunities for some countries and influence their domestic political discourse.
   
   

Work in Progress

1. “Bureaucratic Quality and Local Industrial Development”
   with Muhammad Yasir Khan and S. K. Ritadhi
   

2. “Representation and Resource Allocation Before and After the 17th Amendment”
   with Noah Braun, Paige Montrose, and Lauren Olson
   

Publication

1. “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.