JOB MARKET PAPER

Intra-Household Inequality and Individual Well-Being: Evidence from Nuclear and Extended Households in Urban China [Link]

I structurally estimate the complete allocation of resources within households in urban China, under the assumptions that household members have a similar preference on the private assignable clothing and resource shares are independent of total expenditure. Using the level of resource shares to measure intra-household inequality allows me to conduct individual welfare analyses. In nuclear and extended households with children, I find that females on average spend 26.7% less than males, and in households without children, females on average spend 35.2% more than males. One-third of households' resource shares are spent on children. Finding that a male child on average receives 13.9% more than a female child provides evidence of urban China's preference for sons. Using the estimated individual resource shares, I find that more adult females and female children fall below the World Bank’s international poverty line than using the per capita expenditure measure levels. Based on the results of mean log deviation, I conclude that ignoring intra-household inequality underestimates total consumption inequality by 20.5% in urban China.

PUBLICATIONS

Labor Supply and Time Use: Evidence from Cohabiting Women in the United States, Applied Economics, 54.44 (2022): 5133-5158, with Lei Yue

The population of unmarried heterosexual cohabiting women has nearly tripled in the US over the past two decades. While previous studies have tended to ignore these women, or treat them as single/married, this paper examines the labor supply responses of cohabiting women, single women, and married women from 1996 to 2016 using March-CPS. A comparison of the three groups finds that cohabiting women have the lowest labor force participation elasticity with respect to after-tax wages. That cohabiting women would work more hours if their partners earned more annually and married women would not, points to another behavioral difference between the two groups. Results from ATUS-CPS 2003–2017 further imply that cohabiting women share some of the same characteristics of single and married women. We conclude that unmarried heterosexual cohabiting women should be classified as a separate female group.

Dynamic causality between the U.S. stock market, the Chinese stock market and the global gold market: implications for individual investors' diversification strategies, Applied Economics, 51.43 (2019): 4742-4756, with Robert McNown

This paper proposes a generalization of the prior VAR and EGARCH model to explore the linkage between returns and volatility transmissions in the U.S. stock market, the Chinese stock market, and the global gold market from July 10, 1996 to July 20, 2018. We found that past returns of the U.S. stock market can predict the current returns of the other two markets, and that significant reciprocal volatility transmission existed within and across all three markets. We further implemented average out-of-sample (OOS) forecasting to show that a risk-adjusted portfolio, such as mean-variance with sample estimator, does not outperform an equal-weighted portfolio. This provides insights for individual investors and helps to explain the ongoing disagreement in the portfolio literature concerning the effectiveness of risk-adjusted portfolios and equal-weighted portfolios when the number of assets is small.