Job Market Paper. [PDF] [SSRN]

From 1999 to 2020 China undertook one of the world’s largest expansions of higher education, increasing total enrollment from 4 to 32 million. This paper provides new evidence on how this reform reshaped wages and employment at both the worker and labor market levels. Using newly assembled data from policy documents, I exploit the staggered openings of new colleges and universities across cities for causal identification. The new tertiary institutions significantly increased local population and trained more than 118,000 new graduates per city within a decade. About 45% of the graduate supply was absorbed locally into high-skill services, manufacturing, and state-owned sectors. Yet, cities with larger enrollment expansions also experienced rising unemployment and slower wage growth. Worker-level evidence reveals a large negative wage effect concentrated among young graduates: the college premium fell sharply for post-reform cohorts but remained stable for earlier cohorts. Using a structural labor supply-demand framework, I estimate a very low degree of substitutability across college cohorts, and show that it originates from the declining  quality of recent graduates. The reform created a substantial cohort-specific supply shock that outpaced demand growth, leading to an emerging wage gap between younger and older workers.

Draft available upon request

This paper studies the causal effects of early-life exposure to community violence on long-term human capital development. I assemble a novel dataset linking monthly violent political events in China during 1966–1972 to historical county maps and individual-level microdata from the 1980s–2010s. This linkage allows me to identify the dynamic effects of early-childhood exposure on individuals’ life outcomes from age 10 to 50, exploiting variation in the intensity of local violence across cohorts and places of birth. I find that childhood exposure to local violence substantially reduces the probability of timely school enrollment and lowers educational attainment in adulthood. The detrimental effects are most pronounced for exposure during the ``critical'' developmental stages: in-utero and before age five. Strikingly, the adverse effects are concentrated among girls and resulted in a persistent gender education gap. I show that these patterns are consistent with a dynamic model of parental investment and human capital formation.

This paper examines the predictors of patent infringement litigation in the United States through the lens of firm networks and the search-and-bargaining cost of patent markets. We assemble a novel firm-dyadic dataset with inter-firm litigation histories, collaboration networks, and detailed information on patent portfolios and firm characteristics. Using a matched case-control design, we compare actual plaintiff–defendant dyads with observationally similar firm dyads to estimate how a plaintiff firm’s information search cost and structural position in firm networks affect the likelihood of filing patent litigation cases. We show that beyond traditional factors like direct competition and patent similarity, inter-firm collaboration networks play an important role in reducing information search cost associated with increased patent complexity and ownership fragmentation, thereby moderating litigation risks.