About

Hi!

I am an Economics PhD Student at LMU Munich with a research interest in trade, spatial, & urban economics. I will be on the upcoming academic job market.

You can find my CV here.

Research

Working Papers

“Unproductive Exporters”

Job Market Paper, draft available soon

Abstract

Canonical trade models predict that only the most productive firms export, yet in developing economies a significant share of exporters are among the least productive. This paper shows these firms often sell almost exclusively abroad (“only-exporters”), a phenomenon that can mute or reverse expected productivity gains from trade. I establish three stylized facts using cross-country and Chinese firm-level data: (i) only-exporters comprise roughly one-fifth of all exporters; (ii) they emerge from large, low-income countries with intense domestic competition and serve smaller, richer, less competitive foreign markets; and (iii) they are among the least productive firms. A trade model with non-homothetic preferences rationalizes this with an “exporting to escape” mechanism: intense domestic competition or low local income pushes the least productive firms to serve more favorable foreign markets. Using China’s WTO accession as a quasi-natural experiment, I show liberalization increased the prevalence and market share of these low-productivity firms. This reallocation toward the economy’s least productive segment muted, and in some industries reversed, expected aggregate productivity gains. The findings show that trade integration’s effects are conditional on country characteristics and can cause aggregate productivity and welfare to decouple.

“Export Induced Spatial Divergence” joint with Lei Li and Jinfeng Luo (PDF), new version available soon

Abstract

How does export liberalization affect firm location choice and the spatial concentration of economic activity? We address these questions using the geo-coordinates of Chinese manufacturing firms and find that export widens inter-city and intra-city spatial disparities by reinforcing initially large industry centers. We first show that there has been an increased spatial concentration across cities in response to improved foreign market access. Only industry city pairs that were large initially increase their employment density following trade liberalization. Second, there has also been an increased spatial concentration within cities. For a given industry, districts closer to city centers are getting denser, mainly driven by the extensive margin. Third, the above effects are not exclusive to industries directly exposed to export shocks but also spill over positively to upstream and downstream industries and negatively to industries competing for the same workers locally.

Work in Progress

“From Access to Exit: Roads, Rural De-Industrialization, and Divergence”, draft available soon