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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 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.
How Separate Pension Eligibility Affects Family Life: Evidence from Urban China (with Siming Ye)
Housing Privatization, Marry Up and Wealth Redistribution
Weathering the Shock: Liquidity Constraints and the Enrollment of Pension Program in Rural China
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