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The Decline of China’s Intraregional Market Integration in Qing Dynasty in Institutional Change and China Capitalism, 2022, ed. A. Le Riche, A. Parent and L. Zhang, pp. 31-51, London: World Scientific (with Chuantao Cui and Xiao Yang)

   

    This paper shows that China's intraregional market integration was on the decline during the Industrial Revolution era when Western Europe went through an increasing market integration, based upon econometric analysis. We present a unified theoretical framework which can help understand the concept of market integration more clearly. Beyond traditional measures, we propose and apply a new method to estimate the market integration intensity: the arbitrage cost between two prefectures, and the associated arbitrage probability. All empirical results are consistent with the conclusion of a decreasing intraregional market integration in Qing China.

China’s Port-Hinterland Coordinated Economic Development under ‘Maritime Silk Road’ Initiative Journal of Coastal Research, 2020, Special Issue No. 112, pp. 465-471 (with Chi Gong, Xianghui Yang, and Yujia Liu)


    China’s 'Maritime Silk Road' initiative is getting increasing attention worldwide and this study examines how well China coordinates its ports and hinterlands to boost its economic growth under the initiative. Our empirical analysis reveals that: i) China’s all five major ports demonstrate some port-hinterland economic synergy, though with varying structures and levels. Specifically, Fuzhou Port’s development is mainly driven by the hinterland economy while Haikou Port’s development by the port economy, and the economic coordination is much more balanced as Beihai Port, Quanzhou Port, and Guangzhou Port are concerned. ii) Measures like optimizing industrial structures, increasing value added for products and services, and perfecting infrastructure can facilitate port-hinterland coordinated development greatly.

Research Papers

A Directed Search Model of Occupational Mobility

    There has been considerable interest in the patterns of occupational mobility and their effect on various economic issues. In this paper, I utilize the unique interview structure of the longitudinal SIPP to uncover additional interesting facts on occupational mobility. I find that occupational behavior exhibits strong persistence not only among employed workers but also among non-employed workers; occupational switchers do not always switch to an occupation similar to their previous one; and the average length of transition duration workers spend before taking a new stable job varies with their previous occupation. Motivated by theses facts I build a directed search model of occupational mobility, which includes both aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks, and features occupational human capital as well as search frictions. The model can account for the bulk (around 70%) of the patterns in the data and can match reasonably well the emphasized facts. The model is used to study (i) the importance of idiosyncratic vs. aggregate shocks, and (ii) the barriers to occupational mobility. I find that idiosyncratic shocks are the main determinant of occupational mobility whereas aggregate shocks are unimportant. Further, fixed mobility costs and search frictions constitute significant barriers to mobility while the transfer loss of occupational human capital is only of modest importance quantitatively.


The U.S. Occupational Mobility from 1988 to 2003: Evidence from SIPP

   This paper uses SIPP, an underutilized data set to analyze the occupational mobility in the U.S. from 1988 to 2003. Exploiting SIPP's detailed information on workers' occupation, I propose and calculate various extended versions of occupational mobility rate to do robustness check, with careful treatment of the coding error. Unlike works that treat occupational mobility homogeneously, I classify all occupational switches into three categories: horizontal, vertical and special. Numerous mobility rates are computed according to different definitions, categories, time intervals, and subgroups. I find that, in terms of shares, horizontal switches dominate vertical and special ones at all times; that the mobility level and trend are generally consistent with other empirical works; and that aging decreases the occupational mobility while education's role ambiguous. Moreover, I examine the interaction between occupational mobility and labor market status, taking advantage of SIPP's high interview frequency and rich labor market information recording. I develop an algorithm to extract nonemployment information between jobs from SIPP. I find that most occupational switchers do not experience nonemployment between jobs, very similar to job changers without involving an occupational switch, but the duration variation is less in the former group than in the latter group. As time goes by, the employment-to-employment mobility fraction is declining for both groups.

General Occupational Tenure and Its Returns (with Chi Gong)

    We show that the task specificity of human capital is in line with the occupational specificity of human capital, by studying the returns to occupational human capital using a task-based approach, more specifically, under the assumptions that all occupations are uniquely distinct and that occupational human capital is partially transferable. We name the associated tenure variable ``General Occupational Tenure'' and propose an empirical Transfer Rate function that relates its transferable portion with the occupation distance. Combining SIPP data and task information from the DOT, we perform generalized wage regressions under 1-, 2-, and 3-digit occupational classifications and find that ``General Occupational Tenure'' is more important than other tenure variables. Moreover, three salient patterns are revealed: returns to the General Occupational Tenure demonstrate great variation across occupations; the fixed return generally dominates the variable return; and the two are always negatively correlated. Finally we generalize this result by showing that they actually apply to a large family of convexly decreasing Transfer Rate functions: as the discounting becomes heavier these functions converge to the limiting case where the three patterns hold.

Emerging Market Economies’ Choice of Monetary Instrument: Evidence from China and India (with Chi Gong)

   
   
By applying the cointegration and error-correction analysis, this paper investigates the monetary instruments used by China and India’s monetary authorities. The money supply reaction functions and the interest rate reaction functions are estimated, on the basis of a transformed Taylor Rule, and comparisons are made to examine which type can provide more insights into central bank behavior. Contrary to the findings on industrialized economies that the interest rate is used to smooth output and stabilize the price level, the estimation results conclude that China and India manipulate monetary aggregates to implement their monetary policies.

Work in Progress

Identifying Monetary Policy in a Small Open Economy: the Case of Korea (with Chi Gong)


Credit Constraints and Job Search in General Equilibrium (with Zhiming Fu and Lei Zhang)


Financing Innovation and Economic Growth in Markets with Asymmetric Information (with Zhiming Fu and Deshan Li)