Research
Research
Working Papers:
Job Market Paper
Abstract: I develop a tractable quantitative general equilibrium model with farmland institutions and urban labor market frictions to study how the creation of a farmland transfer market shapes structural change in China. I show that the market weakens the agricultural sector’s function as the country's "labor reservoir", reducing its capacity to absorb workers displaced by trade shocks. This effect operates through land rental adjustments, which lower the elasticity of urban labor supply. Quantitative results indicate that the impact is substantial, leading to higher urban unemployment and greater welfare losses from such shocks. The paper also identifies other unintended labor market consequences that may arise, clarifying their underlying mechanisms and elucidating the conditions under which they may be triggered. Overall, the paper underscores that reforming rural land institutions should be an endogenous process that accounts for the critical interactions between distortions in the farmland market and the urban labor market.
Abstract: This paper develops a two-sector small open economy model to examine the relationship between offshoring and unemployment. The analysis focuses on unemployment arising from mismatches between labor supply and demand, driven by wage rigidity. It explores how offshoring influences domestic unemployment by altering the structure of the home country’s labor market. Through rigorous analysis, the paper finds that the productivity effect of offshoring (Grossman & Rossi-Hansberg 2008) negatively affects domestic employment when offshoring takes place in a sector with an excess relative labor supply. Conversely, offshoring can have a positive impact on domestic employment when it occurs in a sector characterized by excess relative labor demand. This mechanism provides a theoretical explanation for the sectoral heterogeneity in the employment effects of offshoring observed in empirical studies.
Work in Progress
（with Weidi YUAN）
Abstract: This paper studies the impact of weather uncertainty at anchorages on maritime bunkering industry. We propose a new structural estimation framework to quantify the economic costs of such uncertainty. This framework compares two approaches of achieving equivalent industrial scale: fiscal subsidies and financial markets that hedge meteorological risk. By analyzing the fiscal expenditure gap between these approaches, it allows for a general-equilibrium assessment based solely on observable local data, without requiring global market elasticity estimations. We then exploit unique data on meteorological forecast indices and bunkering operations to construct measures of weather uncertainty and associated bunkering costs, which are embedded directly into the model. We highlight the role of financial markets in mitigating maritime service cost volatility and promoting industrial development.