Guanyi Yang
I am an economist. I build heterogeneous-agent macroeconomic models to study labor markets, human capital and inequality, and I use surveys and microeconometric methods to value environmental goods and study education in China. Current projects measure what dark skies are worth, how flexible access to college changes lifetime welfare, how hiring discrimination shapes racial gaps in jobs and wealth, and why emerging economies’ business cycles behave differently.
Selected findings
- Contingent Behavior Modeling for Dark Skies Valuation at Great Sand Dunes National Park (2026). If the night sky at Great Sand Dunes National Park were as bright as an average suburb, visitors’ consumer surplus would fall by about 23–24 percent; at urban brightness it would fall 42–44 percent. Each unit increase in satellite-measured nightlight cuts visitation by about 0.05 days per visitor over five years.
- Better Late Than Never: Macroeconomic Impact of Intermittent College Enrollment and Tuition Subsidies (2025). Allowing people to enroll in college at any age, rather than only right after high school, accounts for about one quarter of the total welfare value of college in a life-cycle general equilibrium model; the gain is largest for people who start adult life with the least wealth. A nationwide tuition-free program raises the share with a bachelor’s degree from 25 to 78 percent and welfare by nearly 40 percent.
- Macroeconomics of Racial Disparities: Discrimination, Labor Market, and Wealth (2026). In a search-and-matching model with prejudiced and non-prejudiced firms calibrated to the U.S., hiring discrimination accounts for about 57 percent of the Black–White unemployment gap, 48 percent of the average wage gap and 16 percent of the median wealth gap; removing it raises Black workers’ welfare by 12.9 percent and aggregate welfare by 1.5 percent.
- Unemployment Dynamics and Informality in Small Open Economies (2022). Emerging market economies have less volatile and less countercyclical unemployment than small open advanced economies, despite larger output swings, and a two-sector search model shows that a bigger informal sector explains much of the difference: informal jobs absorb adjustment that would otherwise run through unemployment.
- Sibling Spillovers in Rural China: A Story of Sisters (2022). In rural China, each year a younger sibling spends in school raises the elder sibling’s Chinese test score by 1.42 percentage points, and by 2.26 points when the younger sibling is a girl; there is no significant effect when the younger sibling is a boy. The channel appears to be a more academic home environment rather than more parental spending or attention.
- Global Financial Risk, Equity Returns and Economic Activity in Emerging Countries (2024). Global financial risk shocks reach emerging economies mainly through equity markets, not sovereign spreads: when the response of equity returns to the VIX is shut down, the share of output variance explained by global financial risk falls from about 10 percent to 2 percent, while shutting down the spread response changes almost nothing.
All papers, by theme and by status →
Research themes
- Economics of the night sky
- College access, human capital and life-cycle risk
- Racial disparities in labor markets and wealth
- Emerging markets: informality and global financial shocks
- Children, families and schooling in rural China
- Behavior and public goods
Teaching
At Colorado College I teach Principles of Macroeconomics (EC102), Macroeconomic Theory (EC302), Economics of Inequality (EC290) and Economics of Education Policy (EC385), and I direct the State of the Rockies Dark Sky Lab, where undergraduates co-author research. Materials for learning computational macroeconomics are in the computational macroeconomics starter kit.
Consulting
For applied economics consulting (survey design, causal analysis, policy modeling, economic valuation), see Focalize Solutions.
Contact
Department of Economics & Business, Colorado College, Palmer Hall 114-C, 14 E. Cache la Poudre St., Colorado Springs, CO 80903. gyang@ColoradoCollege.edu · +1 (719) 389-6416