Research

Is Deservingness Merit-based or Need-based?
Evidence from Medical Crowdfunding

Job Market Paper
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This paper studies how donors respond to merit and need when giving to families facing unaffordable medical expenses. With data from a leading crowdfunding platform in China, I find that campaigns receive more donations if recipients report having a higher education level or attending more selective colleges. The college rank effect persists even after controlling for content and textual characteristics and donor fixed effects. To identify the effect of donor preference, I conduct an online survey experiment to elicit the willingness of respondents to donate to fundraising vignettes, in which the patients’ college and medical expenses are independently randomized. Both academic merit and financial need enhance donor generosity. Female and younger respondents respond more to need and less to merit. The college rank effect is more pronounced for top and in-province institutions and among people with better knowledge of the ranking. Merit helps attract donations, likely by enhancing perceived deservingness. Novel textual methods based on large language models are developed to extract information and build measures from fundraising stories efficiently.

Social Learning in Policy Making

Joint with Yiming Cao

Using large language models to categorize policy documents and exploiting a unique social networking setup among policymakers at China’s Party School, we investigate the diffusion of policy ideas. The study finds that policy diffusion is more likely between cities with leaders who were classmates in these training programs. The results indicate that social networks significantly influence policy transmission. The impact of these social connections is equivalent to approximately 10% of the effect of directly moving a policymaker from one jurisdiction to another. These findings primarily apply to non-economic policies, suggesting that when tackling complex social problems, policymakers rely on knowledge exchange with more experienced peers in their network.

Born to lead: Name Order Effect in Political Selection in China

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This paper studies the name order effect in political selection in a non-democracy. I document that Chinese officials with fewer strokes in their surname are overrepresented in top leadership bodies, as a result of simple surnames appearing early in a roster. The overrepresentation relative to the population (and to social elites) is driven by 17% of names with the fewest strokes (≤ 5 strokes). I show that prefectural leaders with simpler surnames have a higher chance of promotion, and the effect increases with the size of the candidate pool. This name order effect stems from the formal substitution process, more name exposure, and suggests limited attention and misperception of decision-makers during political selection. Therefore, cognitive bias and fatigue not only affect voters with low information in a democracy but also sophisticated politicians seeking competent or loyal subordinates or successors in a non-democracy, thus affecting who becomes top leaders in China.

The Economic Impact of Closing Illicit Markets:
Evidence from China’s Crackdown on Prostitution

• Using synthetic control methods, we estimated the economic impact of a crackdown on prostitution in Dongguan
• Tourism suffered a major blow due to the removal of the sex industry and increased law enforcement
• As collateral damage, we document a reduction in entertainment consumption for local households by a diff-in-diff strategy
• Using a spatial diff-in-diff, we explore its economic impact at the block level
  
  

The Intergenerational Effect of Malaria Eradication

Joint with Siddharth George and Saravana Ravindran

Using a cohort DID design and exploiting regional variation in malaria endemicity, we investigate whether parents’ exposure to malaria eradication program affects the health and labor market outcomes of their children. We find zero effect in India and other countries. We document an educational benefit for children who are themselves exposed to malaria eradication in China.