Research
Research
(Job Market Paper) Sectoral Shocks and Gendered Responses in Higher Education: Evidence from the Dot-Com Collapse
Draft coming soon
This paper examines how sector-specific shocks shape gender differences in field-of-study choices. I develop a model of major choice under uncertainty with gender heterogeneity in risk aversion. The model predicts that when a sector shock raises the risk of returns in the linked major, more risk-averse students—particularly women—reallocate away, raising the ability threshold for entry; and that women who avoid the risky major substitute into closely related fields. I test these predictions using the dot-com collapse as a natural experiment, combining Swedish administrative data on graduation cohorts 1997–2007 with academic preparation and educational environment. The IT bust widened the female–male gap in IT graduation from about 10 to 15 percentage points. Among those who persisted in IT, women’s GPA rank rose by three percentile points relative to men, consistent with stronger positive selection. Conditional on completing an IT degree, women were 10 percentage points less likely than men to enter the IT sector one year after graduation. Consistent with the model, women who left IT shifted into engineering, a close substitute. In addition, effects are concentrated in IT-linked programs, with no changes in less-exposed fields. These results highlight risk as a mechanism that amplifies gender segregation in high-return sectors and reshapes the composition of talent entering them.
Property Rights, Intra-Couple Wealth Gap, and Family Outcomes: Evidence from China
Abstract: This paper examines how wealth and control of assets within couples shape bargaining power and family decisions. I exploit the 2011 Marriage Law Reform in China, which replaced equal division at divorce with a registered-owner rule, as a natural experiment. Using spouse-level panel data and a difference-in-differences design, I show that the reform increased husbands’ housing title shares by 31.5 percentage points, generating an intra-couple wealth gap of 65,220 CNY (about ten times wives’ annual income). While deed-share gaps narrowed modestly over time, the wealth gap persisted as housing prices surged. In a second stage, I use the reform-induced shifts in intra-couple property share and wealth gaps as instruments to estimate their causal effects on household behavior. The results show that greater husband ownership reduces the risk of divorce, increases female labor force participation, and increases wives’ housework hours. When wives hold more property, divorce becomes more likely, labor supply still rises, but unpaid work declines. Estimates based on wealth gaps (value-based) are weaker, highlighting that formal control of property rights, rather than asset value, drives bargaining outcomes. This paper is the first to quantify intra-couple housing wealth gaps in China and to trace their consequences, demonstrating how gender-neutral legal reforms can reinforce intra-household inequality and underscoring the central role of property rights in shaping family behavior.
Previously circulated as The Gender Wealth Gap in China (May 2024) SOFI Working Papers in Labour Economics 3/2024
You Are the Elite Now: Admission Effects of an Excellence Reform in the Chinese Higher Education System (October 2024) SOFI Working Papers in Labour Economics 5/2024
with Tianze Liu.
Abstract: This paper examines how university applicants in China respond to a government policy that designates specific university-discipline units as centers of excellence. Affecting over 10 million applicants annually, the policy aims to enhance human capital and global competitiveness, potentially improving the quality of professional skills in the workforce. Using a Difference-in-Differences approach, we analyze the policy’s impact at three levels: (1) Within disciplines, we find that the excellence designation increases competition by attracting higher-ranking applicants to designated units; (2) Within universities, we observe spillover effects, with non-designated disciplines also benefiting from increased competition, likely due to students perceiving non-designated disciplines within the same university as excellent; (3) At the university level, institutions with designated disciplines experience a significant rise in overall admission competition compared to those without such designations. Our findings underscore that discipline-specific excellence designations effectively attract higher-ranking applicants to designated disciplines and elevate the university’s overall competitiveness. The spillover effects suggest that students perceive an institution-wide enhancement of quality, possibly due to shared resources and administration. Consequently, students may be strategically responding to both specific and general signals of excellence, anticipating employer preferences for graduates from these recognized institutions regardless of discipline.