research

Selected Working Papers

War and Human Capital Accumulation: Evidence from the Second Sino-Japanese War (with Yizheng Wang) (Draft available upon request)

Conference Presentations: 2026 Spring CETW (Renmin University of China); YES × Chengdu: China Economic Theory and Policy Workshop (Southwest University of Finance and Economics) (2026); 2026 Annual Workshop on Economics of Education in China (AWEEC) (Tsinghua University); 2026 PHBS Think Tank Conference; 2026 Asian Summer School in Econometrics and Statistics (Poster Session, UCAS, Beijing); 2026 SERC (Singapore). 

• Main Findings: Post-war birth cohorts from counties that bore heavier wartime losses attain 0.09 to 0.16 more years of schooling, with gains concentrated at primary and junior-high completion and larger in counties with weaker pre-war educational capacity, without ancestral clans, and outside treaty ports.

• Contributions: Builds a county-level wartime-loss measure from 1.89 million digitized martyr records merged with pooled census microdata, and shows through a cohort difference-in-differences design that the long-run educational gains operated through two complementary channels: higher government fiscal investment in education and the intergenerational transmission of education-oriented values.

Early-Life Deprivation, Political Identity, and Face Consumption: Evidence from China (Draft available upon request)

Conference Presentations: 2025 Chinese Economists Society (CES) Academic Rising Star Paper Competition (First Prize); 3rd Xishan Economic Forum (2025); 2025 International Conference on Consumption Studies; 2026 CES Annual Conference. 

• Main Findings: Famine survivors who later joined the CPC spend significantly more on face-related consumption in adulthood, with larger effects among post-reform entrants, men, rural residents, and those with low trust in government.

• Contributions: Using a triple-differences (DDD) strategy to identify how historical famine exposure with political affiliation jointly shape long-term consumption behavior.

Empower with Extracting: The Innovation Effects of Structural Fiscal Incentives (with Lezheng Liu,  Yizheng Wang, and Zehua Ye (All Joint First Authors)), Under Review.

Conference Presentations: 2025 CUFE-OEP Conference; YES × Chengdu: China Economic Theory and Policy Workshop (2024); 2nd Forum on China's Digital Economy Development (2024); 2nd Forum on the Evaluation of China's Economic Policies (2024); 47th Xiangzhang Economics Seminar (Beijing) (2024); 7th International Conference on Government and Market Economics (Tsinghua University) (2025); 5th Xiangzhang Forum on Taxation (Dongbei University of Finance and Economics) (2025).

• Main Findings: Local fiscal incentives tied to high-tax firms increase R&D investment but discourage innovation quality, as firms shift toward strategic rather than substantive innovation.

• Contributions: Develops a theoretical framework linking tax-sharing arrangements to innovation misallocation, and implements a generalized DID strategy based on China's VAT reform. The analysis highlights how tax-base protection and reduced external competition distort firms’ innovation choices.

The Effects of E-Commerce on Rural Revitalization: Evidence from China's Rural E-Commerce Demonstration County Program (with Siyi Wang, Weijie Luo (Co-author))

Conference Presentations: 2nd Annual Conference on Inclusive Finance, FinTech, and Sustainable Development (2024); 2nd Xishan Economic Forum (2024).

• Main Findings: Using a staggered DID model, we find that the Rural E-Commerce Demonstration County (REDC) policy significantly improves local economic outcomes, increasing per capita income by 10.9% across Chinese counties.

• Contributions: Our study provides novel empirical evidence on the role of e-commerce in rural revitalization in a developing-country context. We further apply machine learning models, including random forest, SVM, and ML, to identify and predict the policy's underlying transmission channels.