Research
Publications
Working Papers
Formation and Evolution of Beliefs: Famine Experience and Trust in Neighbors
(with Zhian Hu and Chuanchuan Zhang) (draft coming soon)
Abstract
This paper examines how a traumatic experience across differential cultural configurations, can shed light on norms of risk sharing and community cultural persistence, in the context of Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961). We use cross mortality-clan-cohort variations and a difference-in-difference-in-differences method to study the evolution of clan culture values in the wake of the Famine. Our fnding documents that the famine exposed cohort that live in a stronger clan county report higher level of trust in their clan members, relative to the people who didn't perceive a sever famine. Our fnding are robust to a set of placebo tests and robustness check. The results remain stable for dynamic effects models. This paper contributes to literature on the effects on traumatic experience by focusing on a particular aspect, i.e., the formation and evolution of personal belief.
Cost of Zero-Covid: Effects of Anti-contagious Policy on Labor Market Outcomes in China
(with Andong Yan and Jialin Yu)
[Nomination For The Best Paper Award, 1st International Workshop on the Chinese Development Model, 2022 ]
Abstract
We study the effect of China’s anti-contagious policy on labor market outcomes in 2020. By exploiting variation in the duration of the zero-Covid policy in China, which is triggered by the outbreak of new cases of COVID-19 in a 14-day observation window, we find that a 10% increase (3.7 days in average) in the duration of the zero-Covid policy caused the probability of unemployment to increase by around 0.1. Unlike most large economies that suffered a serious health shock from the COVID-19 pandemic, China effectively contained the scale and the spread of the initial outbreak in 2020. This provides a special empirical setting to examine the policy effect of anti-contagious policies, and we show that the disruption on the labor market majorly comes from the zero-Covid containment measures, while health shocks are trivial on the labor market outcomes. Moreover, the zero-Covid policy decreases the labor income and hours worked for employed individuals, and the policy effect is heterogeneous across demographic groups. We also examined the policy effect during different phases of the pandemic, and the results imply that the stringent clearance during the first stage of the pandemic (ended by Feb 17, 2020) caused the negative impacts on the labor outcomes, while the subsequent dynamic clearance strategy did not generate significant disruption on the labor market outcomes in 2020.
Other Publications & Technical Reports
Replication Report: A Comment on Gethin, Martínez- Toledano & Piketty (2022)
I4R Discussion Paper 19, 2023 (with Olle Hammar) Data & Code
Abstract
Gethin, Martínez-Toledano and Piketty (2022) analyze the long-run evolution of political cleavages using a new database on socioeconomic determinants of voting from approximately 300 elections in 21 Western democracies between 1948 and 2020. They find that, in the 1950s and 1960s, voting for the “left” was associated with lower-educated and low-income voters. After that, voting for the “left” has gradually become associated with higher-educated voters, while high-income voters have continued to vote for the “right”. In the 2010s, there is a disconnection between the effects of income and education on voting. In this replication, we first conduct a computational reproduction, using the replication package provided by the authors. Second, we do a robustness replication testing to what extent the original results are robust to i) restricting the sample to “core” left and right parties, ii) analyzing the top 80% versus bottom 20%, iii) weighting by population, iv) dropping control variables, and v) using country fixed effects. The main results of the paper are found to be largely replicable and robust.
Currency Usage in Huizhou Region Before and After Taiping Rebellion: Evidence from Account Books
Jianghai Academic Journal, 2023 (with Weipeng Yuan), in Chinese