Publications
Does Pollution Prevention Enhance Firm Efficiency? Insights from US Manufacturing Firms (with Sumaya Falak Memon and Subal Kumbhakar) (International Journal of Industrial Organization, 107, August, 2026)
Under-Identification of Structural Models based on Timing and Information Set Assumptions (with Daniel Ackerberg, Garth Frazer, Kyoo il Kim, and Yao Luo) (Journal of Econometrics, 237(1), November, 2023) (Working paper version, June 2022)
Ownership and Productivity in Vertically-Integrated Firms: Evidence from the Chinese Steel Industry (with Loren Brandt, Feitao Jiang and Yao Luo) (The Review of Economics and Statistics, 104 (1): 101–115, 2022) [Online Appendix] [Featured in VoxChina]
A Robust Approach to Estimating Production Functions: Replication of the ACF Procedure (with Kyoo il Kim and Yao Luo) (Journal of Applied Econometrics, 34(4), 612-619, 2019)
Working Papers
Geography of Market Power: Evidence from the Chinese Steel Industry (with Loren Brandt, Feitao Jiang, Yao Luo) [Featured in VoxChina]
Capital-Moment Informativeness and Weak Identification in Production Function Estimation (with Kyoo il Kim and Yao Luo)
Stata Package: Economically Motivated Penalization Estimator of Production Functions [klsemp.ado][example code]
We provide a Stata implementation of the economically motivated penalization estimator developed in this paper for the Ackerberg–Caves–Frazer (ACF) production function framework. The package includes the estimation routines, sample data and example code to facilitate empirical applications.
Environmental Regulation and Within-Firm Adjustment: Evidence from Chinese Steel (with Pan Chen and Feitao Jiang) (Draft available upon request)
Abstract: Firms can comply with environmental regulation by changing how they produce or by treating pollution after it is generated, but firm-level data rarely capture both responses. Using annual stage-level production, environmental, and financial records for Chinese steel firms, we implement a difference-in-differences design that exploits cross-city variation in target-associated regulatory pressure under China’s 2016–2020 Good-Air Days targets. Greater regulatory pressure is associated with adjustment along both margins. Per standard deviation of target intensity, the converter scrap share rises by 2.2 percentage points, about one fifth the size of the national increase over the period, as firms substitute scrap for pig iron and need less sulfur-intensive sintering per ton of steel. Environmental investment rises by about 116 million CNY in 2015 prices, or 48% of its sample mean, concentrated in air-pollution control. SO2 emissions per ton of crude steel fall by about 18%, while pre-tax profit per ton rises by about 1.3% of operating revenue per ton. More broadly, when firms can comply along more than one margin, an evaluation resting on emissions or financial outcomes alone cannot reveal how compliance happened: what regulation actually changed inside firms.
Work in Progress
Vehicle Emission Standard and Air Pollution: Evidence from China (with Jieqi Cai, Yakai Yao, Zhe Yuan) (Draft coming soon)
Pollution Prevention or Green Innovation? Unraveling Firms’ Environmental Choices (with Sumaya Memon and Wenya Wang) (Draft coming soon)
Capacity Investment Under Demand Uncertainty: Evidence from the Chinese Steel Industry (with Loren Brandt, Feitao Jiang, Yao Luo)