Projects

Distributional Consequences of China's Randomized Private School Admission in Spatial Equilibrium

Abstract: In 2019, China mandated that oversubscribed private schools admit students through randomized lotteries conducted concurrently with public-school assignments, ending decades of preemptive “cream-skimming” in private admissions. Although the reform targeted greater education equity, the linkage between public school assignment and residential address raises the possibility that housing market responses could offset expected equity gains. I evaluate the policy’s distributional consequences using a quantitative urban model with general equilibrium pricing and endogenous residential sorting. The model predicts that the policy draws higher-socioeconomic-status households into districts with better public schools, steepening rent gradients and reconnecting access to quality schools with ability to pay. The resulting price pressures and sorting amplify inequality, particularly where housing supply is inelastic. I estimate the structural model using a panel of over 100 major cities, including housing prices and attributes, school quality and capacity, and middle school entrance exam and application data. With second-hand housing transaction data, I implement a difference-in-discontinuities design to provide reduced-form evidence of rent gradient changes.

Last updated: October 2025

The Effect of Short Videos Consumption on Adolescents' Ideology

Abstract: I study adolescents’ digital media consumption and ideological beliefs using an original survey of 2,261 secondary-school students in a county in Hunan, China. Short-video viewing proves to be a dominant use of smartphones in this population. I examine how platform choice, viewing time, and content categories correlate with students’ ideological positions--including political, social, and life-orientation dimensions--and the degree of opinion polarization. Results show correlations between short video exposure and opinion polarization, and point to the platform-embedded online friends networks as an understudied influence of adolescent beliefs. I then implement a randomized experiment to identify the causal effects of short-video exposure on adolescents’ attitudes and polarization.

Last updated: December 2024

Centralized Student Choice and Assignment Systems in China's Mandatory Education

Abstract: The adoption of Centralized Student Choice and Assignment Systems (CCAS) has been on the rise worldwide. From 2003 to 2022, major Chinese cities gradually established CCAS in primary and secondary school admissions. I assemble the first dataset that documents the presence and attributes of CCAS for all 134 cities whose populations exceeded one million each. I provide descriptive evidence on the adoption patterns and heterogeneity in implementation details. Then I estimate a diffusion model to investigate the determinants of CCAS adoption. Results suggest that city population and male average education correlate with earlier adoption, with caveats of small sample size and the difficulty in identifying peer effects. The wide coverage and heterogeneity of CCAS warrant more research on their optimal local forms and welfare implications.

Last updated: December 2025

Measure Theory ("Lebesgue Integration and Fourier Analysis")

Lebesgue measure and integration, applications of Lebesgue integration, Banach spaces and functional analysis, Fourier analysis and applications to PDEs

Last updated: December 2024

Real Analysis ("Mathematical Analysis")

The “ε-δ” definition of limits, continuity, differentiation, integration, convergence of series of numbers and sequences of functions, Taylor series, inverse function theorem, implicit function theorem, multiple integrals

Last updated: January 2023

Statistical Inference - A Bedtime Story

A fairytale of data reduction, point estimation, hypothesis testing, and interval estimation

Last updated: December 2022