Check out my article on the World Bank Development Impact blog!

This paper studies how government actions shape workers’ expected returns to striking by exploiting China’s anti-corruption campaign as a natural experiment. Using a city-level dataset linking corruption inspections to strikes from 2011 to 2020, I show that strike incidents rise sharply after a city’s first high-profile inspection, driven largely by wage arrears from private firms and concentrated in the construction and manufacturing sectors. Strikes also spread through network channels, with later-treated and neighboring cities responding to inspections elsewhere. Evidence indicates that inspections weakened firm–government ties and shifted government attention, raising workers’ expected returns and revealing pre-existing grievances among workers.

Politically motivated boycotts aim to harm the sales of goods associated with foreign rivals, but can also harm the domestic economy if the goods are domestically produced. This paper examines the unintended effects of the 2012 Chinese boycott of Japanese cars on China’s automobile supply chain. By comparing changes in employment between auto parts and non-parts industries located at various distances from Japanese joint ventures (JV), I find that auto parts manufacturers near the Japanese JVs experienced a 10-17% reduction in employment after the boycott.

Working Paper

Social Networks and the Spread of Strikes (with Nancy Chau and Oleg Firsin)

Revise & Resubmit, Journal of Population Economics

This paper examines the role of social networks in the diffusion of labor strikes in the United States. Using new data from the Cornell ILR Labor Action Tracker (2021–2024) and Facebook-based county connectedness measures, we document that strikes spread primarily through social networks rather than spatial, industrial, or political linkages. A 1% increase in network exposure is associated with a 2.3% contemporaneous and 0.8% lagged increase in strike activity. We show that both informational and behavioral channels drive diffusion. Policy and administrative environments, such as right-to-work laws and public-sector notice requirements, shape the timing and persistence of these network effects.

Conference Presentations: Global GLO-JOPE Conference 2025, SOLE 2026 (scheduled)