Research

Research Interests

• My fields of interest are urban economics, environmental economics, and development economics.

• Broadly, I am interested in the study of interactions between environmental policies, transportation, and economic activities, and their implications for economic development in China.

Publications

[Google Scholar]

Working Papers

Myopia Peer Effects: Evidence from School-aged Children in Rural China

This paper provides the first study estimating the effects of exposure to social environments with high rates of myopia on children’s vision in the context of rural areas from the developing world. The analysis is built on a multiple-year follow-up panel of school-aged children with detailed vision test data and class enrollment records in rural areas of the northwestern China during 2015-2019. We exploit the random assignment of children graduating from primary schools into classes in junior high schools. We find significant peer effects of the proportion of myopic children in classes on children’s myopia onset and progression in the following years. Myopia peer effects are distributed in a nonlinear way, and tend to vary with the temporal length of the exposure to myopic classmates. The effects are moderated by doctor referral interventions. Additional results quantify the evidence supporting the eyeglass wearing behavior-based channel at work.

The Sun Powers Children's Vision: Evidence from the 5-year Follow-up of School-aged Children in Rural China

This paper explores the effect of sunlight duration on vision for school-age children in the context of understudied rural counties in the developing world. We use a combination of remote-sensored and meteorological data, and the individual-level panel survey with detailed vision records of 8,746 children from grades 4 to 9 in the Western China during 2014 and 2019. We find a sizable enhancement effect of sunlight duration on vision for sampled school-aged children. A 2-hours increase in average sunlight duration in the past three months reduce the vision loss by approximately 0.1 units. Exposure to sunlight decreases the probability of being myopia by 6.3 percentage points, and being moderate myopia by 4.2 percentage points, respectively. Additional results provide the plausible interpretation on behavioral channels including more outdoor activities and sleeping time, and lower probability of reading directly under the sunlight in explaining the effects.

The Legacy of Historical Railroads in China: Local Economic Impacts in A Transition Economy

This paper investigates the impact of railway access on industrial productivity in China during the transition from a planned economy to a market-based economy. We digitize the historical maps of railroads in China from the atlas of China's transportation history and measure railway access at the county level based on transportation time cost. We also compile a comprehensive data of industrial activities from the 1985 and 1995 industrial firm census of China and the 2004 and 2008 China economic census. To mitigate the possible endogeneity issue of railway access, we construct an instrumental variable (IV) by exploiting exogenous variations caused by historical railway distribution and dismantled railways because of exogenous reasons. We find that better railway access has little impact on industrial productivity before 1995, and promotes industrial productivity after 1995. We also find that labor misallocation and over-specialization in the planned economy explain the null impact of railway access, and the more efficient factor allocation and agglomeration economies are the main channels that railway access boosts industrial productivity in the market economy setting.