Publication

Abstract

Democratic management (DM) is an important set of statutory employee participation institutions that goes beyond trade unions in Chinese workplaces; however, its effects on pay and performance are unstudied. Using data from the China Employer–Employee Matched Survey, this study examines how DM is associated with pay and performance levels in China. The study finds that DM is positively associated with workers' hourly wages, fringe benefits, and firms' labour productivity on average, suggesting that it is not merely ‘window-dressing’ as perceived by conventional wisdom. This study also reveals that workplace transparency mediates the relationship between DM and employees' earnings, while the industrial relations climate mediates the relationship between DM and firms' productivity.

Abstract

Parents with a special social status generate spillover effects to other parents and children. Because cadres (government officials) in China have a broad influence on resource allocation, their presence elicits responses from surrounding parents and students. Exploiting random classroom assignments in Chinese middle schools, we find that increased exposure to classmates' cadre parents raises parents' attention to their children's friendships and guidance over schoolwork. We also find evidence suggesting that parental changes raise the child's test scores. The findings highlight parental adjustments as a mediator of the external influence of peer parents on children.

Working Paper 

1. Occupational Shopping of Youth: The Strength of A Worker’s Comparative Advantage (Job Market Paper ) Download

I study how the strength of a worker’s comparative advantage affects her occupational shopping in the early career. I construct the average distance between estimated productivities in the best-matched occupation and the other two occupations to measure the strength, where productivities are estimated from a multinomial logit regression of a worker’s choice of her best-matched occupation. A worker whose productivity distance is larger has a stronger comparative advantage. Such a worker spends fewer years in the labor market and tries out fewer occupations before finding her best-matched one. To quantify the importance of the strength in occupational shopping, I build a learning model, in which a worker learns her occupation-specific productivity by observing the output at the current occupation. Enlarging the productivity distance by one standard deviation in the model reduces more than 80% of occupational changes in the first ten years of careers. Moreover, for an average labor market entrant, the value of learning about her type is 28% of her expected lifetime earning.

2. Good Personalities in Bad Times: Do Good Personalities Buffer Negative Effects of Graduating in a Recession? (with Liwen Chen)

This paper studies whether good personalities would help workers to survive in adverse economic conditions or not. Using a subsample of male college graduates from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, I find that college graduates higher on Conscientiousness are less affected by a recession that happens at their graduation; such workers have higher wages than their classmates.

3. Stay-at-Home Peer Mothers and Gender Norms: Short-run Effects on Educational Outcomes (with Liwen Chen and Bobby W. Chung)

Increased exposure to gender-role information affects a girl’s educational performance. Utilizing the classroom randomization in Chinese middle schools, we find that the increased presence of stay-at-home peer mothers significantly reduces a girl’s performance in mathematics. This exposure also cultivates gendered attitudes towards mathematics and STEM professions. The influence of peer mothers increases with network density and when the girl has a distant relationship with her parents. As falsification tests against unobserved confounding factors, we find that the exposure to stay-at-home peer mothers does not affect boys’ performance, nor do we find that stay-at-home peer fathers affect girls’ outcomes.

Work in Progress 

1. The Effects of Personalities on the Career Mobility of Young Workers

I use monthly job observations from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to examine career mobility patterns and evaluate the effects of personalities on career mobility. The monthly hazard of career-ending is not monotonically declining in tenure, which increases to a maximum in 3–4 months and declines thereafter. Regarding the big five personalities, I find four of them, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Extraversion, and Openness to Experience affect a young worker’s career mobility. On the one hand, conscientious and emotionally stable individuals have lower career mobility. On the other hand, extroverted and open-minded individuals tend to have higher career mobility.

2. Training of Mothers, Female Labor Participation and Fertility over the Life Cycle (with Liwen Chen and Leran Wang)