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Associate Professor, Division of Social Science

Jin Wang

PhD in Economics, The London School of Economics and Political Science

Associate Professor, Division of Social Science

Jin Wang

PhD in Economics, The London School of Economics and Political Science

CEP Research Areas

Development

Areas of Expertise

Development Economics, Public Economics, Chinese Economy

Biography

Jin Wang is an associate professor of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She was educated at the Tsinghua University of China for her BA and MA in Economics before getting her PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research, which mostly has a policy focus, is mainly in the areas of Development Economics, Public Economics and Chinese Economy. She worked on a variety of topics – place-based policies, government hierarchy and incentives, and the labor mobility barriers that are embedded in the hukou household registration system of China. Her work has appeared in a range of economics journals including Journal of the European Economic Association, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Journal of Development Economics and Journal of Comparative Economics.

Related

Development
Conference, Symposium, Forum, Workshop Roundtable meeting on Empowerment and Wellness of Migrant Domestic Workers: Explorations for Cross-sector Collaborations between Field & Academic Experts Migrant domestic workers (MDWs) contribute to Hong Kong society both through their care work, and by enabling labour force participation, mainly of Hong Kong women. Many observers implicitly assume this is “win-win” for both sides, and specifically that this “importation” of low-skilled labour creates both short and long-term gain for the migrants.
  • 2023-03-20
  • 2:00pm - 5:30pm
Development
Publications Why Micro-Credit May Leave Women Worse Off: Non-Cooperative Bargaining and the Marriage Game in South Asia Micro-credit programmes targeting women continue to grow in South Asia, although research suggests that wives frequently hand over loans to their husbands. Women may also be unable to control the income generated by micro-enterprises. This article presents an intra-household bargaining model explaining these findings and showing how credit may leave women worse off, while benefiting men. This game-theoretic model also shows why a woman might rationally choose to give her loan to her husband even though she does not expect to benefit and knows he may not repay. By Sujata Balasubramanian
Development
Publications Is the PDS Already a Cash Transfer? Rethinking India’s Food Subsidy Policies Critics argue that India’s mismanaged Public Distribution System (PDS), which sells subsidised cereals to poor families, should be replaced by cash transfers. Others fear cash may be misused. Using National Sample Survey data, this article demonstrates that families treat additional PDS subsidies wholly as a source of cash – exactly like a cash transfer. More worryingly, cereal consumption has not increased, despite higher real subsidies. Moreover, neither the PDS nor cash transfers are likely to raise total food expenditure in poor families. By Sujata Balasubramanian
Development
Research Affiliate Sujata Balasubramanian Sujata Balasubramanian is a development economist who works on public policy issues related to South Asia, and especially India. She has a Ph.D. in Political Economy and Public Policy from the University of Southern California.  
Development
Publications Expanding Footprints: The Impact of Passenger Transportation on Corporate Locations This article investigates how transportation networks shape firms' geographic footprint by reducing monitoring costs of distant investments. Exploiting the staggered expansions of China's passenger high-speed rail (HSR) network, the authors document that the amount of intercity investment between a pair of cities increases by 45% with the introduction of an HSR line connecting the cities. They enhance the causal inference by applying high-dimensional fixed effects, and focusing on city pairs that are "accidentally" connected in the network. By Yatang Lin, Yu Qin, Johan Sulaeman, Jubo Yan, Jialiang Zhang
Development
Publications When student incentives do not work: Evidence from a field experiment in Malawi James Berry, Hyuncheol Bryant Kim and Hyuk Harry Son study how the structure of tournament incentive schemes in education can influence the level and distribution of student outcomes. Through a field experiment among upper-primary students in Malawi, they evaluate two scholarship programs: a Population-based scholarship that rewarded overall top performers on an exam and a Bin-based scholarship that rewarded the top performers within smaller groups of students with similar baseline scores. By Hyuncheol Bryant Kim (on leave), James Berry, Hyuk Harry Son
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