Research

Research Interests

International trade; quantitative spatial economics; market integration; regional development; urban and population geography; industrial policy; China and emerging Asia.

Working Papers

The Local Multiplier Effects of Trade: A Quantitative Analysis of China (Job Market Paper)

with Kensuke Suzuki, Xiaocong Xu, and Junfu Zhang

• Develops a multi-sector quantitative spatial model calibrated to China’s 2017 MRIO table to study how export shocks propagate through domestic production networks and labor markets.
• Shows that multiplier heterogeneity is driven by the intra-regional manufacturing trade share; model-implied local GDP multipliers range from 0.30 to 1.02 across provinces.
• Combines structural analysis with IV evidence from city-level data, estimating sizable export-income and export-employment spillovers.

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

• Builds a panel of 3.99 million city-pair-month observations from daily wholesale prices in 117 Chinese cities, matched with AutoNavi intercity mobility data.
• Studies how passenger infrastructure affects market integration in a setting where freight conditions are stabilized by China’s Green Passage policy.
• Finds that HSR connectivity is associated with lower intercity price dispersion, with evidence pointing to passenger mobility and trader interaction as the main mechanism.

Population Agglomeration and Spatial Reallocation in China

• SSRN preprint: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6569183
• Companion website: https://pop-density-spatial.streamlit.app/
• Use annual WorldPop population density rasters (2002-2020), downsampled to approximately 5 km, to document the evolution of China’s population geography.
• Show 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%.
• Track a 17 km southeastward shift in the population-weighted centroid and find no evidence of systematic provincial catch-up in β/σ convergence tests.
• Provide raster-based descriptive evidence for spatial economics, regional science, and China regional development.

Other Applied Work

Applied Econometric Research and Forecasting

• Modeled determinants of Intel Corporation’s net revenue with regression analysis.
• Coauthored publication in Engineering and Technology Quarterly Reviews.
• Forecasted international passenger demand with seasonal ARIMA models in SAS.

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.