Hiring quotas can reshape who enters the workforce and how organizations perform. I study a gender quota that effectively preserved the representation of a historically dominant group: men in China's civil service. After merit-based hiring boosted women’s share of new recruits to about 67%, some county tax bureaus introduced one-to-one gender quotas mandating equal hires by sex. I build a new dataset by web-scraping and digitizing position-level civil service exam records and county tax revenues, which I then link together. Using this dataset, I show that counties with more recent female hires were more likely to adopt quotas, especially in tax-collection roles. Exploiting variation in the timing and intensity of adoption across counties, I use a matched staggered difference-in-differences and event-study framework to show that quotas decrease female representation, lower candidate quality, and reduce worker productivity: tax revenue falls by 4.7%, or about $4 million per county per year. Evidence suggests these effects stem from both reduced personnel ability and gendered institutional practices, offering new insights into debates over reverse affirmative action when historically dominant groups become outnumbered.

"Timing Motherhood: A Field Experiment on Job Prospects" (with Myongjin Kim, Daniel Nedelescu and Leilei Shen)

Young women face a dilemma regarding when to enter the labor market: before or after having children. This study conducts a correspondence experiment in China’s accounting sector, randomizing marital status and number of children on job applicants’ profiles to signal the likelihood of maternity leave under the national family planning policy. We crafted resumes for 12 fictitious applicants, varying with sex, age, marital, and parental statuses. We submitted these resumes to 1,000 job openings for entry-level accounting positions, successfully applying to 985 postings. By analyzing the number of callbacks received from employers, we assess how marital status and number of children influence hiring decisions at the initial stage.  Our findings reveal that marriage decreases the likelihood of a callback for women by an average of 3 percentage points. This negative effect is primarily driven by discrimination against married women without children, and it completely disappears for women who have reached the maximum number of children allowed under the policy. A simple hiring cost model suggests that employers’ concerns center on anticipated maternity leave costs rather than perceived declines in productivity among married mothers balancing work and childcare. Notably, the marriage penalty does not affect men.

"Information Provision and Gender Difference in Labor Outcomes: Evidence from an Online Job Board" (with Gaojie Tang)(New draft coming soon)