Publications:

"Do College Graduates Serving as Village Officials Help Rural China?" (with Guojun He)
​American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2017, 9(4), pp 186-215.
  • Abstract: This study estimates the effect of improved bureaucrat quality on poverty alleviation by exploring a unique human capital reallocation policy in China – the “College Graduate Village Officials” (CGVOs) program. We find that introducing CGVOs into the village governance system improves the targeting and implementation of the central government’s social assistance programs. CGVOs help eligible poor households understand and apply for relevant subsidies, thus increasing the number of pro-poor program beneficiaries. Further analysis suggests that CGVOs improve the quality rather than the quantity of village bureaucrats, and their presence reduces elite capture of pro-poor programs.
  • Award: Gregory Chow Best Paper Award, Chinese Economists Society, 2015
  • Media Coverage: AEA Research Highlight; Financial Times (Chinese); CNPolitics (Chinese).


​Working Papers:

"Religion and Motivated Cognition: When Ramadan Meets the College Entrance Exam" (with Ao Wang and Xiaoyang Ye; 2018)​​ 
  • Abstract: China’s high-stake College Entrance Exam is held on June 7th and 8th each year, which happens to fall in the Muslim Ramadan month between 2016 and 2018. With a Difference-in-Differences design, we first document that taking the exam during Ramadan strongly worsens the relative performance of Muslim students. We then conduct a field experiment with Muslim students who were about to take the exam (during Ramadan) in 2018. We invite well-respected Chinese Muslim leaders to grant explicit exemptions to delay the fast until after the exam, which we randomly provide to some Muslim students, creating experimental variation in the stringency of religious practices. We then show all Muslim students the same information on the cost of taking the exam during Ramadan. We find that when students think they have to fast during the exam (no exemption), they show strong patterns of reality denial by underestimating the cost of fasting on exam performance; but for those that received exemptions, such bias in learning is alleviated, which makes them more willing to delay the fast for the CEE. Our results provide new evidence that religion distorts high-stake economic behaviors by generating motivated cognition.​

​"Environmental Regulation and Firm Productivity in China: Estimates from a Regression Discontinuity Design" (with Guojun He and Bing Zhang; 2017) Submitted.
  • ​Abstract: This paper estimates the causal effect of environmental regulation on firm productivity using a regression discontinuity design implicit in China’s surface water quality monitoring system. Since water quality readings are important for political evaluation, and the monitoring stations can only capture emissions from the upstream, local governments are incentivized to enforce tighter environmental regulations on firms in the immediate upstream of a monitoring station, rather than those in the immediate downstream, despite their spatial adjacency. Exploiting this discontinuity in regulation stringency, we find that upstream polluting firms’ TFP are 27% lower than downstream firms’. We estimate that China’s water pollution abatement target between 2016 and 2020 would lead to roughly one trillion-Yuan loss in total industrial output value.
  • Award: Gregory Chow Best Paper Award, Chinese Economists Society, 2018
​
"Fiscal Competition and Coordination: Evidence from China" (2016, new version coming soon)  
  • ​Abstract: This paper intends to provide causal evidence on fiscal competition and coordination between local governments. We first introduce a unique empirical setting created by the combination of two national programs in China, the “Rural School Consolidation (RSC)” program and the “Special Economic Zones (SEZs)” program, in which spatially adjacent townships have discontinuous incentives to either compete or coordinate with a neighboring SEZ. Exploiting such quasi-experimental variation with a spatial-discontinuity design, we find a series of empirical evidence on the existence of competition and coordination between local governments, which can be formally rationalized by a simple model where asymmetric jurisdictions compete for mobile labor. Our results suggest that the strategic interactions among local governments play important roles in public goods provision and labor migration: during the RSC program (2001-2011), townships that coordinate with their neighboring SEZs closed an extra 15% of local primary schools, and lost an extra 7% of local population, as compared to townships that compete with their neighboring SEZs.
  • Award: Sidney Hoos Award for Best Second Year Paper, UC Berkeley ARE, 2016

"Buddha's Grace Illuminates All: Temple Destruction, School Construction, and Modernization in 20th Century China" (with Boxiao Zhang; 2015) Under Revision for Resubmission.
  • Abstract: This study describes a novel natural experiment in early 20th century China known as the “Temple Destruction Movement” (TDM), where local governments were required to take over the assets of Buddhist and Taoist temples to support the modernization of local schooling. We show that before the TDM, the initial stock of average temple assets was not correlated with various measures of human capital and economic development; while after the TDM started, regions with higher initial stocks of average temple assets constructed more schools, enrolled more students, produced more modern elites, and experienced faster economic development. Moreover, we find that the impacts of the TDM have persisted into the 21st century: regions with higher initial stocks of average temple assets before the TDM still had higher levels of human capital and better economic performance in 2000. We also find suggestive evidence that temples affected both mid-run and long-run development mainly through the channel that the TDM boosted local human capital accumulation.


​Works in Progress:

"Designing Performance Indicators for Career Incentives" (with Alain de Janvry, Elisabeth Sadoulet, Guojun He, and Qiong Zhang)

"Incentivizing High-Level State Employees to Directly Confront Rural Poverty: An Experimental Design Based on a National Program in China"

"Improving Social Mobility by Helping Rural Students Make Informed College Choices" (with Ao Wang and Xiaoyang Ye)

"The Economic and Environmental Consequences of Decentralization: Evidence from the Township Consolidation Program in China" (with Zenan Wang)

"Traditional Elites and Modernization" (with Yang Xie and Boxiao Zhang)

"Bureaucrat Quality and State Effectiveness: Evidence from the Bereavement Leave Rules in Historical China" (with Weijia Li and Zenan Wang)


Other Writings:

"Capturing the Transformation Rent: Lessons from Mexico and China" with Alain de Janvry, Policy Brief Ferdi B112, July 2015.

"How Does the Auction of License Plates Affect the Trade of Auto in Shanghai?" Statistical Research (in Chinese), with Boxiao Zhang, V30(3): 78-85, 2013.

"Why Have Some Local Governments Closed More Rural Schools than Others?​" with Yanqing Ding and Xiaoyang Ye, China Economics of Education Review (in Chinese), 2016, 1(4): 3-34.