Research Interests

Shock propagation through connected markets and local economies; local multipliers; quantitative spatial economics; market integration; international trade; regional development; urban and population geography; industrial policy; China and emerging Asia.

Job Market Paper

The Local Multiplier Effects of Trade: A Quantitative Analysis of China

Flagship project: trade-cost shocks, domestic production networks, and local export multipliers. with Kensuke Suzuki, Xiaocong Xu, and Junfu Zhang

Abstract

• Develops a multi-sector quantitative spatial model with inter-provincial input-output linkages, non-tradable production, and labor mobility, calibrated to China’s 2017 MRIO table; parameters recovered via structural inversion from MRIO, ICIO, and Customs micro-data.
• Establishes that local trade multipliers are equilibrium objects shaped by the structure of domestic production linkages rather than universal parameters, and identifies the own-trade share (home share)—not raw export exposure—as the structural organizing statistic for multiplier heterogeneity.
• Extends the quantitative spatial economics framework, typically used for national welfare analysis, to the mechanics of sub-national shock amplification; counterfactual simulations yield model-implied local GDP multipliers ranging from 0.30 to 1.02 across provinces, with inland inward-oriented economies amplifying external shocks through non-tradable service demand.

Other Working Papers

High-Speed Railway and Market Integration: Evidence from Vegetable Price Dispersion in China

Second dissertation paper: transport connectivity, passenger mobility, and spatial price dispersion.

• Constructs the largest daily-frequency panel of Chinese vegetable wholesale prices to date: 3.99 million city-pair-month observations covering ten commodities across 117 prefecture-level cities (2014–2022), merged with AutoNavi smartphone-based intercity passenger mobility indices.
• Leverages two institutional features—China’s Green Passage highway-toll exemption (which fixes variable freight costs for fresh vegetables) and prohibitive HSR freight tariffs for bulk produce—to study a setting in which differences in HSR connectivity reflect variation in passenger rather than freight costs.
• Documents that HSR-connected city pairs exhibit 2–5% lower intercity price dispersion; passenger-mobility controls absorb the direct HSR coefficient, and cross-product heterogeneity (larger effects for bulky, low-value commodities) argues against a freight substitution channel, pointing to passenger mobility and trader interaction as the operative mechanism.

Population Agglomeration and Spatial Reallocation in China

Independent regional science project: population agglomeration, spatial exposure, and prefecture-level heterogeneity — demonstrates geospatial measurement and regional data infrastructure capability.

• SSRN preprint: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6569183
• Companion interactive atlas: Applied Decision Tools
• Uses annual WorldPop population density rasters (2002-2020), downsampled to approximately 5 km, to document the evolution of China’s population geography.
• Shows rising spatial agglomeration: the spatial Gini increases from 0.852 to 0.868, the top-decile population share rises from 73.5% to 76.7%, and the footprint of high-density areas expands by 24%.
• Tracks a 17 km southeastward shift in the population-weighted centroid and finds no evidence of systematic provincial catch-up in β/σ convergence tests.
• Provides raster-based descriptive evidence for spatial economics, regional science, and China regional development.

Methods and Data Expertise

• Methods: causal inference; shift-share IV; panel-data econometrics; event studies; staggered-adoption designs; gravity models; quantitative spatial modeling; input-output analysis; counterfactual simulation.
• Data: Chinese MRIO and ICIO tables; Chinese Customs data; AutoNavi mobility data; high-frequency wholesale price data; geospatial population rasters; GIS-based regional datasets.
• Programming: Python; Stata; R; MATLAB; SQL; SAS; GeoPandas; ArcGIS; Tableau; LaTeX.