Welcome!
I am a PhD candidate in economics at Stockholm School of Economics. I use structural modelling and empirical methods to understand how policies and economic factors shape household decisions, such as marriage, divorce, and fertility choices.
Research Field: Family & Labour
Know more about my research below, or download my CV.
I will be on the 2025/26 job market.
Email: yifan.lyu@hhs.se
Working Papers
Economic Incentives and Learning in Relationship Formation: Evidence from Sweden [Slides]
Presented at: Oxford Applied Micro Seminar (2024), KU Leuven PhD workshop (2024), Applied Young Economist Webinar (Mar), Mannheim Applied Seminar (May), QMUL Economics and Finance Workshop (May),
Scheduled: XXVIII Workshop on Dynamic Macroeconomics, Vigo (July), EEA conference (Aug)
This paper investigates the role of learning—the process where partners gather information about their compatibility—played in explaining the marital transition. To this end, I first exploit a pension reform in Sweden that penalises late marriages, and provide empirical evidence that 1) cohabiting couples values a unit time more when they just met than if they lived together for a long time, 2) Couples married quicker divorced quicker, and 3) Couples whose marriage is incentivised by the reform divorced quicker. These stylised facts are aligned with a theory of learning about match quality. I then develop a structural model with endogenous cohabitation, marriage and divorce matched to the Swedish marriage market and the behavioural response of the pension reform. In the model, agents search for a partner, and upon meeting, may cohabit and learn about their match quality before making a commitment that is costly to break.
This paper examines the impact of two family planning policies on demographic change and human capital accumulation in China. Using province-level data on unauthorised births, I build a heterogeneous-agent overlapping generation model to analyse fertility patterns from 1950 to present. The findings reveal that the policies have far-reaching effects beyond birth control and the quantity-quality trade-off. The birth control policy reduces the number of children per family, but with varying impact across socioeconomic groups. Meanwhile, penalties for out-of-quota births disproportionately affect low socioeconomic groups. I further show that the policy-induced rise in overall human capital of children is mainly driven by the composition effect instead of the quantity-quality trade-off. When composition effect dominates, a relaxation in fertility control does not necessarily lower overall human capital. This study reveals that heterogeneous effects can play an important role in shaping human capital and demographics.
Local Labor Market Frictions and Platform-Based Entrepreneurship (With S.Cao, 2025) [Link]
Accepted, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal
Building on prior research about the heterogeneous impact of labor shocks on individuals' propensity to start businesses, we explore how local labor market frictions affect individuals' selection into platform-based entrepreneurship. Combining detailed data from a large online retail platform with sectoral employment statistics across labor market areas in the United States, we show that entrepreneurs entering the platform during larger local employment declines in related sectors developed more effective customer strategies and maintained stronger sales performance. These entrepreneurs focused more on customer appeal, matched social media channels with the platform's predominant user base, and lowered prices over time.
Other Writings
Do losses loom larger than gains? We use open-source chess engine to evaluate chess games from 16 expert-level tournaments, and we find evidence of behavior consistent with loss aversion in male chess players, though not in female chess players. Monetary incentives always matter to competitors in these tournaments, who play higher quality games both when they are (i) incentivized to win by a gain of more prize money in the event of a victory, and (ii) incentivized not to lose by a loss of prize money in the event of a defeat. However, we find that the quality of chess games played by male chess players is approximately 49% better when they are motivated by the threat of losing a sum of prize money in the event of a defeat, than when they are motivated by gaining an equivalent sum in the event of a victory. We do not observe this in female competitors, whose quality of play do not significantly differ between being motivated by an incentive to win, and by an equivalent incentive not to lose.
Investing in Connectivity: A Network Theoretical Approach to Ranking Maritime Power (With K.-C. Lin & B.Cheong, 2020)
The first formal network theoretical model of maritime powers, using public source data and building on maritime commercial indicators developed in “Impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on Maritime Commercial Power,” (with K. Li, M. Jin, Y. Xiao, Z. Yang, and K. F. Yuen). In press at Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice.