I am an Economist with 5+ years of experience in applied causal inference research, data science, and economic analysis. My research fields are labour economics and applied microeconomics. My job market paper examines the impacts of higher education expansion on workers and local labour markets.

I expect to graduate in spring 2026 and will be available for interviews in the 2025-2026 job market.

Job Market Paper

The Labor Market Consequences of Mass College Expansion: Evidence from China 

Abstract: From 1999 to 2020, China undertook one of the world’s largest expansions of higher education, increasing annual enrollment from 4 to 32 million and contributing 18% of global tertiary enrollment growth. This paper examines the effects of this reform on wages and employment at both the worker and local labour market levels. Using newly assembled city-level data, I exploit the staggered openings of the first local college or university across cities since the 1990s. The first establishment induced more new college openings and rapid enrollment growth, producing on average 118,000 additional graduates per city over a decade. About one-third of them were absorbed locally into high-skill services, manufacturing, and state-owned sectors. While local industries and firms expanded in size, the growth of city average wage and household income was 20 percent lower than non-expanding cities. Worker-level evidence shows that the slowdown in wage growth was concentrated among younger college graduates: the skill premium fell sharply for post-reform entrants but remained stable for earlier cohorts. Using a labor demand model and a wage decomposition framework, I find that college cohorts compete in relatively segmented labor markets, as implied by a very low elasticity of substitution of 1.5 to 2. The supply effect of larger cohort size, combined with declining cohort quality as admissions became less selective, has offset the demand shifts from skill-biased technological change. The reform effectively compressed the college-noncollege wage gap but also led to an emerging wage gap between younger and older workers within the educated workforce.

Publications

The Human Capital Effects of Early Childhood Exposure to Community Violence

Abstract: This paper examines the causal effects of early-life exposure to community violence on human capital accumulation. I leverage a unique historical dataset on violence intensity during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) in China, matched with contemporary census and health survey data. The identification strategy exploits county-by-cohort variation in the number of unnatural deaths attributable to political violence between 1966 and 1971. I find substantial detrimental impacts of early-life violence exposure on both timely school enrollment and completed educational attainment in adulthood. A one–standard deviation increase in violence intensity over a 12-month period before age three reduces educational attainment by the equivalent of more than 1.16 years of a mother’s schooling. The effect is strongest for intrauterine exposure and declines with age in early childhood. Results also reveal a pronounced gender gap: the negative impacts are concentrated among girls, while the estimates for boys are precisely estimated and close to zero. Finally, I document persistent long-run effects of early-life exposure on middle-age adult outcomes, including worse physical health, higher incidence of depression, and weaker cognitive function.

• UBC Faculty of Arts Graduate Award 2020-2025
• UBC President’s Academic Excellence Initiative PhD Award 2020-2025
• UBC International Tuition Award 2020-2025
• David Dodge Fellowship (VSE) 2024