Research

PUBLICATIONS

• " "Less Stress, More Confidence”: Supporting Junior Scholars Online at the Graduate Student International Political Economy Workshop." PS: Political Science & Politics (Forthcoming) - with Cleo O'Brien-Udry and Alex Kirss

WORKING PAPERS

• "Dissecting Trade and Business Cycle Co-movement" (DRAFT) (via GitHub) (July 2022)

International business cycles have become highly synchronized across countries. To understand this empirical phenomenon, I develop a multi-country real business cycle model with trade that captures potential explanations such as shocks to productivity and trade. Then I match the data exactly with the endogenous outcomes of the model so that shocks fully account for the data, including GDP and trade shares. Calibrating the model to a panel of G7 countries during 1992–2014, I find that trade-linkage shocks, which capture increased globalization and trade volatility, account for the most in explaining the synchronization of international business cycles. In contrast, country-specific shocks play relatively minor roles. Furthermore, I use my model to address the trade co-movement puzzle, which states that international real business cycle models should be predicting a much stronger link between trade and cross-country GDP correlations. Once I account for the trade-linkage shocks, the model predicts a strong link between trade and business cycle co-movement.

• "Trade-Induced Marketization, Structural Transformation, and Gender Inequality in the Labor Market" - with Terry Cheung (Academia Sinica) and Han Yang (Academia Sinica) (DRAFT) (May 2024)

We examine the impact of international trade on the gender wage gap and female labor force participation using a multi-sector quantitative trade model that incorporates endogenous labor supply and home production. In this model, as trade increases, the male- and intermediate-intensive goods sector reduces labor inputs in favor of cheaper imported intermediates. Since goods and services are complements, this shift increases the demand for labor in the services sector, which is female-intensive, leading to an increase in female labor force participation and a decrease in the gender wage gap. Additionally, since home production is less intermediate-intensive than market production, individuals substitute home production with market goods and services, further increasing female labor force participation. We find that trade explains 12% of the increased female labor force participation and 14% of the decreased gender wage gap.

WORK IN PROGRESS

• "Global and Local Effects on the Labor Share Decline" - with Han Yang (Academia Sinica)

• "Trade, Automation, and the Male Employment Gap" - with Kristina Sargent (Middlebury) and Erin L. Wolcott (Middlebury)

• "Intra-household Inequality and Gender-Equitable Inclusive Growth" - with Gee Young Oh (Korean Institute of International Economic Policy (KIEP)) and Sally Zhang (Princeton)

• "Impact of Trade and Structural Change in African Lions" - with Ryo Makioka (Hokkaido) and Karim Nchare (Vanderbilt)

• "International Environment Cooperation: Determinants, Interlinkages, and Impacts" - with Mario Larch (Bayreuth) and Joschka Wanner (Würzburg)

• "Trade, FDI, and Business Cycle Co-movement" - with Jacek Rothert (U.S. Naval Academy)

• "Trade, FDI, and Productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa" - with Belinda Azenui (Denison)

• "Competition, Markups, and Gains from International Trade" - with María Pía Olivero (Swarthmore)

• "Impact of Asymmetric Productivity Spillovers in Job-to-Job Transitions: Evidence from Labor Mobility in Academia" - with Eren Bilen (Dickinson) and Xiaozhou Ding (Dickinson)

• "Disentangling the Impact of Trade and Financial Sanctions: Evidence from Iran" - with William Walsh (U.S. Department of Energy)

OLDER WORK

• "Controlled School Choice with Mixed Bounds Approach: A Balance between Stability and Diversity Considerations" (B.S. thesis at Carnegie Mellon University)

Controlled school choice over public schools has been an important concern for both the parents of students and schools. It gives numerous options for how fairness and diversity considerations can be balanced. The notion of diversity is often imposed by limiting the number of admitted students who have the same type (quotas), or by reserving seats for each student type (reserves). The controlled school choice rule that I explore in this paper is the combination of “reserves” and “quotas,” where schools implement minimum reserves (a soft bound) and maximum quotas (a hard bound) together. In this paper, I provide a full characterization of the mixed bounds approach, and show that it satisfies the requirements for the existence of a student-optimal stable matching.