The Labor Market Consequences of Mass College Expansion: Evidence from China
The Labor Market Consequences of Mass College Expansion: Evidence from China
Job Market Paper. [PDF draft coming soon]
Abstract: From 1999 to 2020, China undertook one of the world’s largest expansions of higher education, increasing full-time enrollment from 4 to 32 million. This paper provides new empirical evidence on how this reform reshaped wages and employment at both the worker and local labor market levels. Using newly assembled data, I exploit the staggered openings of thousands of new colleges and universities across cities. The new institution openings led to a substantial increase in local enrollment, producing over 118,000 additional graduates per city over a decade. About one-third of the graduate supply was absorbed locally into high-skill services, manufacturing, and state-owned sectors. Yet, these expanding cities also experienced rising unemployment and slower wage and per capita income growth. Worker-level evidence shows that the negative wage effects were concentrated among younger college graduates: the college premium fell sharply for post-reform entrants but remained stable for earlier cohorts. Using a labor demand model and a wage decomposition framework, I estimate a high degree of imperfect substitutability across college cohorts, which stems from the declining average quality of post-reform graduates. The supply effect of a larger (quality-adjusted) cohort size more than offset the positive demand shifts, leading to an emerging wage gap between younger and older workers within the educated workforce.
The Human Capital Effects of Early Childhood Exposure to Community Violence
Draft available upon request.
Abstract: This paper examines the causal effects of early life exposure to community violence on human capital accumulation, leveraging a unique historical dataset on violence intensity during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in China, matched with individual data from contemporary census and health survey. My identification strategy exploits city-by-cohort variation in the number of unnatural deaths attributable to political violence from 1966-1971. I find considerable detrimental impacts of early life violence exposure on timely school enrollment and finalized educational attainment in adulthood. The adverse effects on educational attainment of a one-standard deviation increases in violence intensity over a 12-months period exposed before age 3 is equivalent to more than 1.16 years of reduction in mother’s years of schooling. This effect is most pronounced for exposure during the intrauterine period and is diminishing with age in early childhood. My results also reveal a significant gender gap, where the negative impacts are mostly driven by girls and are estimated precisely zeros for boys. To explore potential mechanisms, I show suggestive evidence that increased violence exposure at early ages resulted in deteriorated physical health, depression, and some cognitive functions in later life.
Firm Networks, Technology Complexity, and Patent Litigation in the United States
with Ilan Vertinsky and Yong Li
Draft available upon request.
Abstract: This research examines the determinants of patent infringement litigation in the United States through the lens of firm networks and technological complexity. We assemble a novel firm-dyadic dataset that records inter-firm litigation histories and collaboration networks, along with detailed information on patent portfolios and firm characteristics. Using a matched case-control design, we compare actual plaintiff–defendant dyads with observationally similar firm pairs to estimate how a plaintiff firm’s technological complexity and relative position in collaboration networks affect the likelihood of filing a patent litigation case. Our results show that, beyond traditional determinants of litigation such as direct competition and patent similarity, inter-firm collaboration networks play an important role in reducing information search costs associated with increasing patent complexity and ownership fragmentation, thereby moderating litigation risks.