Yuancheng (Ryan) Han

Job Market Paper:

Service Trade, Regional Specialization and Welfare  [R&R, Journal of International Economics]

(with Jorge Miranda-Pinto, Satoshi Tanaka)

How much does trade in services affect regional production specialization and welfare? Using unique Canadian trade data, we document that the size of inter-provincial service trade is comparable to that of good trade, and that net exports of services are highly correlated with the value-added share of tradable services across provinces. With a quantitative spatial equilibrium model featuring domestic and international trade, we quantify the effects of service trade. Our results highlight that domestic service trade significantly promotes regional specialization, with heterogeneous welfare gains that reduce regional disparities. Conversely, international service trade generates more uniform welfare gains across provinces.

Working Papers:

Competition among Cities (with Satoshi Tanaka, Bo Zhao)

How do cities compete for skilled migrants through mobility control regulations? City governments in China have the power to select rural migrants through a skill-dependent Hukou system. Our self-built unique Hukou stringency measure indicates that (i) Hukou stringency increases disproportionately with city size, and (ii) the gap in Hukou strictness across cities widens overtime.  Embedding the endogenously determined Hukou threshold system into a spatial  equilibrium model allows us to match these two stylized facts. Our counterfactual analysis highlights the nature of competition among cities:  a city is more likely to relax its Hukou stringency when other cities do so, or when there is a productivity catch-up from cities lower down the productivity ladder.  We also find the national optimal Hukou policy still requires the most productive cities to maintain a certain Hukou stringency.

Technological Change and Intergenerational Mobility (with Arpita Chatterjee, Aarti Singh, Satoshi Tanaka)

Using novel administrative data from Australia, we examine the role of technological change in shaping the spatial variation in intergenerational mobility. Our stylized facts reveal that  regional variation in exposure to technological change is positively correlated with regional variation of upward mobility. To uncover the mechanisms through which technological change may impact, we construct a multi-level mediation analysis. We show that 38.2% of intergenerational rank-rank slope is explained by child's choice of cognitive occupation and college education and parent's choice of neighborhood and occupation. Of these channels, we find that both the child's and parent's choice of cognitive occupation significantly impacts the intergenerational rank-rank slope, their relative contributions being 9.9% and 10.9% respectively.