Estimation of Welfare Effects in Hedonic Difference-in-Differences: The Case of School Redistricting

with Christopher Bollinger, Michael Clark and William Hoyt

College Education, Enrollment Location, and the Geographical Mobility of Young Adults

with Shu Cai and Rui Du

Reshaping Traditions: Pension Reform, Son Preference, and Old Age Support

with Yang Jiao and Yuyun Liu

Like Mother, Like Child: The Earned Income Tax Credit and Gender Norms

with Yang Jiao, Yi Lu, and Xincheng Qiu

The Effects of Public Investments Funded by the Community Development Block Grant on Residential Property Values: Evidence from Cuyahoga County, Ohio

with Valencia Prentice

Impact of Asymmetric Productivity Spillovers in Job-to-Job Transitions: Evidence from Labor Mobility in Academia

with Eren Bilen and Paul Ko

Maternal Education and Early Childhood Outcomes in China

with Yaxiang Song

Economics of Education Review, 2025, 107, 102660. PDFPublished version

In this paper, we study how maternal education affects children's early childhood health outcomes and the development of social and motor skills. We take advantage of the higher education expansion in China, which creates credible exogenous variation in access to colleges that improves mothers' educational attainment, to examine these effects through an instrumental variable approach. Our results show that increases in years of schooling beyond the nine-year compulsory education level significantly improve children's outcomes. Specifically, we find that more maternal education reduces the likelihood of low birth weight and accelerates the development of skills such as speaking, counting, and walking. We also conduct multiple hypothesis tests to confirm robustness, finding that the positive effects on child development remain significant. Mechanism analyses suggest that maternal schooling is associated with assortative marriage, rural–urban migration, delayed fertility, and potentially greater awareness of effective child care and investment strategies. This study provides new evidence on the intergenerational benefits of maternal education on a comprehensive set of child outcomes in an emerging economy and contributes to the literature by focusing on educational attainment beyond compulsory schooling.

Too Late to Buy A Home? School Redistricting and the Timing and Extent of Capitalization

with Christopher Bollinger, Michael Clark and William Hoyt

Journal of Regional Science, 2024, 64(1), 207–237. PDFPublished version

In the past fifty years, a voluminous literature estimating the value of schools through capitalization in home prices has emerged. Prior research has identified capitalization using a variety of approaches including discontinuities caused by boundaries. Here, we use changes in school boundaries and the opening of a new school in Fayette County (Lexington), Kentucky to identify this capitalization. Critical to properly estimating the effect of redistricting is to account for when information on redistricting is available. We treat the information about the effects of zoning as occurring in three stages: announcement of the intent to open the new high school and redistricting, approval of the specific redistricting plan (map), and implementation (opening of the new high school and actual changes in boundaries). We find significant changes in values for homes redistricted from lower-performing schools and we find that this capitalization occurs well before implementation of the redistricting. As we show, failure to account for capitalization occurring before implementation will attenuate and even change the sign of capitalization.

Son Preference, Intra-Household Discrimination, and the Gender Gap in Education in China

with Chenxu Hu and Hao Guo

International Review of Economics & Finance, 2022, 79: 324–339. PDFPublished version

This paper investigates the gender gap in education by dividing it into two parts: the part that comes from intrahousehold discrimination and the part that comes from outside of the family. We develop a novel approach to measure the gender gap in education due to intrahousehold discrimination. Using China Household Income Project (2013) survey data, we find that intrahousehold discrimination accounts for a large part of the gender gap in education. The gap is large and persistent over time in both rural and urban regions, although the overall gender gap in education has declined significantly over time.

The Expansion of Higher Education and Household Saving in China

with Christopher Bollinger and Steven Lugauer

China Economic Review, 2022, 71, 101736. PDFPublished version

We examine whether access to higher education impacts household saving rates. A 2-period model of household saving decisions demonstrates why increased college opportunities induce households with children to save more. We examine this theory using survey data from Chinese households during the unprecedented education expansion. Using estimates of the change in the expected probability of college attendance, we estimate the effect on household saving rates by comparing households before and after the reform. We find that a 10-percentage point increase in the probability of going to college raises the saving rate by 5.9 percentage points.

College Education and Internal Migration in China

China Economic Review, 2021, 69, 101649. PDFPublished version

In this paper, I examine the causal impact of college education on young adults' out-province migration in China using China Family Panel Studies 2010 wave data. I use the number of colleges at the province-year level to identify the effect of college attendance on young adults' later life location choice. 2SLS estimates suggest that attending college significantly increases the likelihood of residing in a different province later in life by 7.5 percentage points. A series of tests shows that the impact of college on migration is heterogenous to people's childhood location, gender, hukou origin, and occupation.

Flood Risk and Salience: New Evidence from the Sunshine State

with Laura Bakkensen and Lala Ma

Southern Economic Journal, 2019, 85(4), 1132-1158. PDFPublished version

A growing literature finds evidence that flood risk salience varies over time, spiking directly following a flood and then falling off individuals' cognitive radar in the following years. In this article, we provide new evidence of salience exploiting a hurricane cluster impacting Florida that was preceded and followed by periods of unusual calm. Utilizing residential property sales across the state from 2002 through 2012, our main estimate finds a salience impact of −8%, on average. The salience effect persists when we base estimation only on spatial variation in prices to limit confounding from other simultaneous changes due to shifting hedonic equilibria over time. These effects range from housing prices decreases of 5.4–12.3% depending on the year of sale. Understanding flood risk salience has important implications for flood insurance and disaster policy, the benefits transfer literature, and, more broadly, our understanding of natural disaster resilience.