I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Yale University. My research focuses on Labor Economics. You can find my CV here.

Multidimensional Skills in Inventor Teams, Job Market Paper

I study the complementarity of multidimensional skills in innovation production and the skill composition of inventor teams. Using patent data linked to inventor social security records and establishment panels in Germany, I construct inventor skills from labor market biographies and uncover a mismatch pattern in inventor teams: There is positive sorting of inventors’ skills even though teams with diverse skills have higher productivity. Quasi-experimental evidence from inventor mobility caused by establishment closures rules out endogeneity or selection bias as the reason behind the discrepancy, pointing instead to search frictions arising from inventor type segregation across labor markets. To rationalize the observed allocation, I build a team formation model in which firms assemble inventor teams for innovation, subject to search costs that are increasing as firms’ chosen team mix deviates from the market composition of inventors. I show that search costs and inventor segregation can reinforce each other in equilibrium, driving the excessive positive sorting in talent allocation. Absent search costs, the share of homogamous teams will decrease by 28.6pp, boosting total innovation by 2.4%.

Marriage Market Responses to Childcare Policies, Draft Coming Soon

Children are a public good in marriage that requires significant time investment. Lack of formal childcare incentivizes specialization in marriage and less assortative matching among couples. I study how childcare policy affects marriage market equilibrium exploiting spatial variations in childcare expansions in Canada and difference-in-differences designs. The short-term effects of childcare expansion depend on how sorted couples are: women with education matching that of their husbands exhibit larger increases in maternal employment than women with higher or lower education than their husbands’. In the long run, educational assortative matching increases among newly-wed couples, amplifying the short-term effects. I build a model of marriage market matching, household allocation, and childcare arrangements to quantify the welfare changes. Formal childcare emerges as a market substitute for home care that contributes to child quality, which increases spousal complementarities in marital surplus and assortative matching in equilibrium. The marital surplus is distributed in a way that clears the marriage market, meaning spouses whose relative attractiveness is made higher by formal childcare experience larger welfare gains. The results underscore the importance of considering marriage market equilibrium feedback when analyzing the effects of family policies.

Publication

“Early-life deprivation and health outcomes in adulthood: Evidence from childhood hunger episodes of middle-aged and elderly Chinese,” with James P. Smith and Yaohui Zhao, Journal of Development Economics 143 (2020): 102417.

Teaching

TA for Introduction to Econometrics and Data Analysis (Undergrad), Yale College, Fall 2020, Spring/Fall 2022 [Evaluations].
TA for Intermediate Econometrics and Data Analysis (Undergrad), Yale College, Spring/Fall 2021 [Evaluations].