Contract Enforcement and the Margins of Trade: Evidence from China's 2015 Judicial Reform (Working Paper — Call for Collaboration)
This paper studies how judicial efficiency affects firm-level trade behavior in China. Exploiting the 2015 judicial accountability reform as a quasi-natural experiment, I construct a court×year panel from over 40 million court rulings (2013–2018) to measure city-level changes in case processing speed. I then merge this with firm-level customs data to estimate the causal effect of improved contract enforcement on firms' export decisions — along both the extensive and intensive margins.
I am currently in the data construction and empirical analysis stage and am open to co-authorship and research collaboration.
Market vs Regulated Services: Evidence from Urban Amenities in Paris
This paper examines how institutional constraints shape the spatial allocation of urban services. Using panel data on Paris neighborhoods from 2000 to 2025, we compare sectors operating under different regulatory regimes: unregulated laundromats, tightly regulated pharmacies, and semi-regulated tobacco shops. We estimate Poisson models of establishment counts with population exposure and fixed effects to identify sector-specific responses to local housing and demographic characteristics. We find that laundromats respond strongly to housing structure, while pharmacies exhibit limited sensitivity, consistent with population-based licensing rules, and tobacco shops display intermediate patterns. Using pharmacies as a benchmark for coverage-based allocation, we construct a counterfactual distribution of laundromats and document systematic differences across neighborhoods. These findings show how regulatory regimes shape the urban geography of services and how market-driven allocation diverges from coverage-based provision.
Management Reorganization in French Business Groups Facing China's Shock (Coauthor with Giordano Mion)
This project examines the impact of multinational firms' Global Value Chain (GVC) participation on the employment market where parent firms are located, specifically focusing on French multinational enterprises (MNEs). By establishing foreign affiliates in connected industries, these firms contribute to changes in local employment dynamics. Using a firm-level GVC difference index between parent and affiliate firms from 2007 to 2021, we first construct an outward FDI network for French MNEs. Integrating this network with French employer-employee data, we observe shifts in parent firm employment following the establishment of new foreign affiliates. For example, a larger GVC difference between parent and affiliate firms corresponds to smaller employment changes in parent firms, suggesting a potential compensatory effect.
Owning More of the Chain: Capital Subsidies and Firm-Level Upstream Shifts in China (Submitting draft)
This paper examines the causal effect of China’s capital goods import subsidy on firms’ production organization from a global value chain perspective. Implemented through the Catalogue for the Guidance of Importing Technologies and Products, the policy subsidized high-technology equipment to promote industrial upgrading and deeper GVC integration. We develop a model with an endogenous choice of production stages in which capital goods may be complements or substitutes for labor. Guided by this framework, the empirical analysis combines matched firm-product-year customs and production data in a difference-in-differences design around the 2008 rollout of the policy, complemented by a propensity-score-matched event study to validate dynamic effects. Using a differential treatment framework, we find that the policy induced firms to expand their span of production stages, with effects concentrated on upstream imports. These findings demonstrate how targeted equipment subsidies can accelerate vertical upgrading and reposition firms within global value chains..