Research
Each paper has its own page with the abstract, the main numbers, what the paper does and does not show, the literature it speaks to, and every public version. Pages are grouped by theme below; the lists that follow are by publication status.
Themes
- Economics of the night sky · 1 papers
- College access, human capital and life-cycle risk · 4 papers
- Racial disparities in labor markets and wealth · 1 papers
- Emerging markets: informality and global financial shocks · 2 papers
- Children, families and schooling in rural China · 2 papers
- Behavior and public goods · 1 papers
Publications
- Contingent Behavior Modeling for Dark Skies Valuation at Great Sand Dunes National Park
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
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. - Global Financial Risk, Equity Returns and Economic Activity in Emerging Countries
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. - Unemployment Dynamics and Informality in Small Open Economies
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
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. - How Much Does Schooling Disutility Matter?
Adding a disutility-of-schooling term to a structural education-choice model is equivalent to assuming a relationship between wealth, risk and schooling: with the term present, the utility return to education falls with wealth and, when agents have a precautionary saving motive, rises with the riskiness of future consumption. - Does Wealth Matter? An Assessment of China’s Rural-Urban Migration on the Education of Left-Behind Children
Parental migration raises the chance that a left-behind child in rural China is enrolled in school on time when the family is poor, but the benefit shrinks as family wealth rises and reverses above a house size of about 148 square meters; poorer migrant parents compensate for lost time by spending more on schooling. - Welfare Under Friction and Uncertainty: General Equilibrium Evaluation of Temporary Employment in the U.S.
In a U.S.-calibrated general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms, temporary contracts act as a buffer against firing costs and rising firm-level risk, reducing the welfare loss from higher firing costs by about 1.3 percent, but they do not restore the efficiency lost to those frictions and are not equivalent to cutting firing costs. - How Much Versus Who: Which Social Norms Information Is More Effective?
In a randomized survey of 559 college students voting on a hypothetical ‘green fee’, telling them that 85 percent of peers at other schools voted yes raised stated contributions by about $7–8 (roughly 25 percent), while telling them the dollar range of peer fees lowered contributions by about $8–9; given both pieces of information, the effects cancelled. - The Effect of College Major on Labor Market Outcomes of Chinese Immigrants: An Examination of Undergraduate Major Choices and Their Impact on Employment and Earnings
Among college-educated Chinese immigrant men in the 2009 American Community Survey, 36 percent majored in engineering and all five most common majors were in STEM or business, a pattern statistically different from Japanese and Korean immigrants and native-born whites; a major’s popularity among Chinese immigrants is weakly and positively related to its employment probability and earnings.
Working papers
- Macroeconomics of Racial Disparities: Discrimination, Labor Market, and Wealth
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.
Other
- Yang, G. (2012). A Look at Ohio’s Foreign-Born Population. Economic Trends, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, August 6, 2012. FRASER