RESEARCH
Working Papers
Multinational Production and Innovation in Tandem (Job Market Paper)
Awarded FREIT-EIIT Best Graduate Student Paper Prize, 2023
Multinational firms colocate production and innovation by offshoring them to the same host country or region. In this paper, I examine the determinants of multinational firms’ production and innovation locations. I find complementarities between production and innovation within host countries and regions, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in tariffs. To evaluate manufacturing reshoring policies, I develop a quantifiable multicountry offshoring location choice model. I allow for rich colocation benefits and cross-country interdependence and prove supermodularity of the model to solve this otherwise NP-hard problem. I find the effects of manufacturing reshoring policies are nonlinear, contingent upon firm heterogeneity, and they accumulate dynamically.
Joint with Jie Bai, Maggie Chen, Xiaosheng Mu, and Daniel Yi Xu, Under submission
We investigate how market congestion and information friction affect firm dynamics and market efficiency in global e-commerce. Observational data and self-collected quality measures from AliExpress suggest significant demand frictions and potential misallocation in the online market. A randomized experiment that offers new exporters exogenous demand and information shocks demonstrates the limited ability of existing platform mechanisms to help small sellers overcome the demand frictions. We show theoretically and quantitatively that having a large number of market participants undermines the functioning of existing online mechanisms and hinders the discovery of high-quality sellers. Policy counterfactuals highlight that blanket-wide onboarding initiatives can aggravate market congestion, slow down the resolution of the information problem, and result in market misallocation.
NBER Working Paper 28100, HKS Working Paper No. RWP20-037, VoxEU, VoxDev.
Joint with Deepak Hegde and Boyan Jovanovic
We develop a model of strategic disclosure in which patenting inventors possess private information about their invention’s quality. We show that under certain conditions, high quality inventors signal their private information by disclosing their patents sooner. We test the model’s predictions by analyzing inventors’ disclosure choices after the American Inventors’ Protection Act of 1999, which allowed inventors to accelerate the disclosure of their patent applications. The empirical results are consistent with the model’s predictions and suggest large industry-level variation in inventors’ disclosure strategies and competitors’ learning from disclosures.
Work in Progress
Automating Services: Artificial Intelligence in the US Legal Industry
Presented at NYU
How do AI technologies affect lawyers' work, law firm productivity and competition, and access to affordable legal services?
Strategic Competition and Innovation for Multiproduct Firms
Joint with François Miguet, Presented at NYU
A framework of oligopolistic competition and innovation for multiproduct firms to think about the rising concentration and the speed and direction of product innovation.
Global Diffusion of Technology: Evidence from the Smartphone Industry
Joint with Jie Bai, Daniel Yi Xu, Yingyan Zhao
To what extent do the competitive strategies and product offerings of major phone companies influence the access to new technologies for consumers in developing countries?
Other Publications
Do Industrial Policies Lead to Excess Capacity? Empirical Evidence from China
Joint with Zonglai Kou and Xueyue Liu, Fudan Journal (Social Sciences Edition), 59(5), 2017: 148-161.
Industrial policies on capital investment in China come in two types—those that incentivize firms to purchase more equipment, and those that discourage investment by restricting firms' equipment choices or even mandating divestment of existing equipment. The encouraging policies effectively induce more investment and lead to rising excess capacity, especially in state-owned firms. However, the restrictive policies have little effect on reducing excess capacity.
Policy Suggestions to Dissolve Excess Capacity
Joint with Zonglai Kou and Xueyue Liu, Review of Economic Research, 66 (2017): 20-21.