Research

Theme: I design search models to study frontier risks (e.g. crypto, climate change, AI, social media, China, political polarization, financial disintermediation, etc) and their policy implications, Why search models? Ask me in person!

Bank Concentration and Reserve Concentration, with Mengbo Zhang (SUFE)

Status: submitted

Limited Liability and Disaster Underinsurance, with Laura Bakkensen (Oregon), John Jones (FRB Richmond) and Toan Phan (FRB Richmond)

Status: submitted

Leveraging the Disagreement on Climate Change: Theory and Evidence,  with Laura Bakkensen (Oregon) and Toan Phan (FRB Richmond)

Status: JPE, forthcoming

Artificial Intelligence and Technological Unemployment, with Ping Wang (WashU)

Status: JME,  resubmitted

Social Network Addiction  with Tommy Leung (WFU) and Koleman Strumpf (WFU)

Status: presenting 

Decentralized Mass Movement and Tullock's Paradox: Theory and Evidence from Hong Kong  with Pui-Hang Wong (Maastricht)

Status: presenting 

Disintermediating the Interbank Market, with Mengbo Zhang (SUFE)

Status: presenting

Severance Pay in an Optimal Contract, with Borys Grochulski (FRB Richmond) and Yuzhe Zhang (TAMU)

Status: AEJ Micro, 2025

Lending Relationships and Optimal Monetary Policy,  with Zach Bethune (UVA), Guillaume Rocheteau (UC Irvine) and Cathy Zhang (Purdue); online appendix and Stata data

Status: REStud 2022

Payments on Digital Platforms: Resilience, Interoperability and Welfare, with Jonathan Chiu (Bank of Canada)

Status:  JEDC 2022

An Heterogeneous New Monetarist Model with an Application to Unemployment, with Guillaume Rocheteau (UC Irvine) and Pierre-Olivier Weill (UCLA) 

Status: JME 2021 and NBER WP

Eggs in One Basket: Security and Convenience of Digital Currencies, with Charlie Kahn (UIUC) and Francisco Rivadeneyra (BoC)

Status: submitted 

Should the Central Bank Issue E-money, with Charlie Kahn (UIUC) and Francisco Rivadeneyra (BoC).

Status: Journal of Financial Market Infrastructures 2019

A Tractable Model of Monetary Exchange with Ex-post Heterogeneity, with Guillaume Rocheteau (UC Irvine) and Pierre-Olivier Weill (UCLA) , slide, math appendix, numerical appendix

Status: TE 2018 and NBER WP version

Estimation and Inference of Threshold Regression Models with Measurement Errors, with Terrence Chong (CUHK), Haiqiang Chen (WISE) and Isabel Yan (CityU HK)

Status: SNDE 2018

Monetary Exchange and the Irreducible Cost of Inflation

Status: JET 2016 

A Tractable Monetary Model under General Preference, slides, online appendix and data 

Status: REStud 2016

Indeterminacy and the Elasticity of Substitution in One-sector Models, with CK Yip (CUHK)

Status: JEDC 2012

Policy Writing 

How large is the rounding tax of phasing out pennies?

Can China Avoid a Liquidity Trap?

Crypto Conglomerate: Economics and Regulations

Federal Reserve as The Borrower of Last Resort

Why Stablecoins Fail: An Economist’s Post-Mortem on Terra

A Historical Perspective on Digital Currencies

SWIFT, Sanctions and Dollar's Dominance

The Fed v.s. Platform

Should the Fed Issue Digital Currency? Some Considerations

Monetary Policy and Small Business

Institutional Barriers and World Income Disparities

Teaching 

A reading list of recent works on innovation and endogenous growth

ECON820 Money in the Macroeconomy, for grad 2015, Queen's University

ECON1011 Introduction to Microeconomics, for undergrad 2011, Washington University in St Louis

Some reading on methodology

Dormant or subsumed papers

Contingent Debt and Performance Pricing in an Optimal Capital Structure Model with Financial Distress and Reorganization, with Borys Grochulski (FRB Richmond)

Status: FRB Richmond working paper 

Self-Insurance and the Risk-Sharing Role of Money, 2018

Status: Richmond Fed Economic Quarterly

Working Through Distribution: Money in the Short and Long Run, revised 2018, with Guillaume Rocheteau (UC Irvine) and Pierre-Olivier Weill (UCLA) 

Status: expanded into "A Heterogeneous New Monetarist Model with an Application to Unemployment" and NBER WP

On the Essentiality of E-money, 2017 revised, with Jonathan Chiu (Bank of Canada)

Status: BoC WP

E-Money: Efficiency, Stability and Optimal Policies, 2013, with Jonathan Chiu (Bank of Canada)

Status: BoC WP

Current Activities

Guest Editor of Journal of Economic Theory,   Special Issue of Models of Decentralized Markets (with Ricardo Lagos, Guido Menzio, and Guillaume Rocheteau)

Associate Editor of Economic Modelling 

Associate Editor of 經濟研究 

Education 

Ph.D. in Economics, 2012, (Washington U in St Louis)

B. Soc Sci and M. Phil in Economics, 2007 (Chinese U of Hong Kong)