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About Me

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Georgetown University. My research lies at the intersection of development and labor economics, examining how couples adjust labor supply in response to pension eligibility under weak social safety nets, with evidence from rural pension enrollees in China.

Before and during my Ph.D., I worked at the World Bank Group for 6 years across 4 divisions, from the Development Research Group, Poverty, Energy Global Practices, to Operations Policy & Country Services. I helped build a structural model in Matlab to simulate and estimate household responses to block pricing. I supported senior management by transforming operational data into decision-ready insights in Stata. I also led data harmonization of the MTF global energy-access surveys in R and built Python scrapers to extract conflict-relevant text for visualizations for DRC/Burundi.

I hold an M.A. in Economics from Duke University and a B.A. in Actuarial Science from the Central University of Finance and Economics.

You can find my latest CV here.

Research

Job Market Paper

Displace Him, Deploy Her? Couple’s Asymmetric Labor Responses to Pension Eligibility (with Siming Ye) — [Paper]

Abstract: This paper challenges the consensus that when one spouse retires, the other is more likely to retire as well because of their complementarities in leisure. We show theoretically that when pension replacement rates are low and households depend heavily on home production, one spouse’s retirement can instead increase the other spouse’s labor supply, as they substitute toward market work to offset lost earnings rather than toward shared leisure. Using a regression discontinuity design in rural China, we find that when husbands become pension-eligible, their wives’ labor supply rises substantially. Eligibility pushes men out of higher-wage formal jobs into home production while their pension replaces only a small share of lost income. These results reconcile conflicting evidence across labor and development economics and highlight how pension design can unintentionally place a greater burden of old-age security on women.

Mandatory Retirement under Generous Pensions: Household Reallocation in Urban China (with Siming Ye)

Abstract: This paper studies how households adjust to mandatory retirement when pension benefits are generous. Our framework emphasizes that generous pensions need not generate joint retirement when statutory retirement simultaneously removes access to formal employment. Using reduced-form regression discontinuities around husbands’ statutory retirement age of 60 in China’s urban employee pension system, where pension replacement rates average about 70 percent, we find that husbands’ labor force participation falls by about 20 percentage points at the cutoff. Wives do not increase overall labor force participation, but they reallocate toward home business and self-employment by 4.9 percentage points, while husbands shift time toward grandchild care. An income-shock decomposition shows that pension income offsets about 83 percent of husbands’ lost formal earnings, helping explain the muted aggregate spousal response. Relative to rural China, where lower replacement rates generate strong added-worker effects, the urban evidence suggests that greater pension generosity dampens aggregate spousal labor responses while shifting adjustment toward sectoral reallocation and household time use.

Public Policy with Inattentive Agents: The Case of Electricity Pricing (with Hanan Jacoby, Quy-Toan Do)

Abstract: Using data from a price and information experiment carried out among residential electricity customers in urban Vietnam, all of whom have air conditioners, we estimate a dynamic structural model of daily electricity demand over the billing cycle under block-pricing. While consumers are assumed to be forward-looking, to know the nonlinear price schedule, and to rationally forecast future changes in ambient temperature, they can be inattentive to past electricity usage and naive about their inattention. A randomly assigned SMS message providing information on cumulative usage exogenously causes consumers to pay attention (if only briefly) and thereby make closer-to-optimal decisions.

Weathering the Shock: Liquidity Constraints and the Enrollment of Pension Program in Rural China

Demand Forecasting and Pricing Decisions under Constraints: The Design of Pension Contribution

Teaching

• Undergraduate Econ Principles Micro, ECON 1001 — Fall 2025
• Undergraduate Intro to Econometrics, ECON 2120 — Spring 2025
• Undergraduate Intermediate Micro, ECON 2101 — Fall 2023
• Undergraduate Inequality and Growth, ECON 441 — Spring 2023
• Master in Economics Microeconometrics, ECON 586 — Fall 2022, 2024
• Undergraduate Time Series Econometrics, ECON 424 — Spring 2022, 2024
• Master in Economics Microeconomics, ECON 551 — Fall 2021