Job Market Paper
Raising Grievances to the State: The Political Economic Effects of Anti-Corruption Crackdowns on Labor Activism in China
Check out my article on the World Bank Development Impact blog!
Government-firm corruption can affect workers' welfare and strike decisions. This paper presents a simple model examining a worker's decision to strike and the influence of corruption on that decision. The model predicts that higher corruption decreases workers' return to strike by increasing workers' perceived firm-government corruption. I then test the model by studying the impact of China's anti-corruption crackdown on strikes, leveraging temporal and geographical variations in corruption inspections. To test this, I built a unique dataset by combining city-level labor strikes and inspections. Following a first high-profile corruption inspection in a city, strikes doubled within one year and tripled within two years. The increase in strikes was mainly in private construction and manufacturing sectors with wage arrears as the primary reason, predominantly in cities with high prior corruption levels. Confirming the model's prediction, the inspections increased workers' expected return to strike, thereby revealing pre-existing grievances in a corrupt environment. A back-of-the-envelope calculation estimates a welfare loss to workers of up to 1.2 billion yuan ($170 million) without the anti-corruption crackdown.
Conference Presentations: The 21st Journées Louis-André Gérard-Varet (2022), 100 Years of Economic Development (2022), The North East Universities Development Consortium (NEUDC) (2022), The 20th Midwest International Economic Development Conference (MWIEDC) (2023)
Working Paper
Who Bears the Cost of Nationalism? A Spatial Analysis on the Unintended Spillover Effects of Boycotts (Revise & Resubmit, Economic Inquiry)
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 6-11% reduction in employment after the boycott. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that this equates to 2.2 billion ($300 million) to 7.6 billion ($1 billion) yuan of forgone wages, equivalent to 1.5-5.3% of the profit in the Chinese auto parts industry in 2012.
Conference Presentation: The 2022 Midwest International Trade Conference
Selected Work In Progress
Labor Strikes and Social Networks (with Nancy Chau and Oleg Firsin)
Social media platforms such as Facebook play a significant role in facilitating and spreading labor strikes. Using the Cornell ILR School's Labor Action Tracker, our study shows a significant positive correlation in the frequency of labor strikes between own county and the other counties connected to own county via strong Facebook friendship networks during 2021-2022. We then tested various county-to-county linkages and found that the spread of strikes across counties correlates uniquely with social media friendships, rather than with other types of connections like geography, industry, or political ideology. This highlights the vital role of social networks in organizing labor movements. We are currently conducting further analyses to explore the underlying mechanisms.