As an empirical micro-economist, my research explores topics spanning labor economics, health economics, and development economics. I am also a Stata programmer with the experience creating Stata packages.
Working Papers:
"The Long Term Effect of Being Born During An Economic Prosperity" by Yutian Yang The study explores how economic growth during the pregnancy and the first ten years of life affect Chinese children’s cognitive ability measured in junior high school. Using the luminosity intensity of nighttime lights as a proxy for local output, I find that only economic growth in the first year of a child’s life significantly improves cognitive ability, with the effect entirely due to girls. Children from highly educated families benefit more from growth than those from less-educated families.
"How Does Having A Sibling Affect Childhood Academic Performance? "[link]by Yutian Yang This research analyzes how numbers of brothers and sisters as well as the birth order affects his/her junior high school test score, and analyzes through what channels these variables function, using cross-sectional data from China where most families have up to 2 children. The two endogenous variables --- number of brothers and number of sisters --- are instrumented by the first child's gender and its interaction with dummy variables representing different applicable birth control policies. OLS regressions yield an insignificant negative relation between the test score and the number of brothers and sisters. But the 2SLS regressions find large positive impacts of numbers of brothers and sisters. The coefficients of number of brothers and sisters are similar indicating that gender of siblings does not affect test scores. Birth order has negative impacts on test scores and offsets almost all of the positive impact of siblings on the last born child, which means the positive effect of siblings benefits the older instead of the younger children. In addition, the mechanism study shows the numbers of brothers and sisters improve older children's test scores by increasing study time, reducing internet/video game time, and leading to family's requirement on them for outstanding academic performance and higher education degree attainment. --Presented at New York State Economics Association Conference, Rochester, 2019 October, --Presented at Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies Annual Conference, Princeton University, 2019 August
"Does Economic Growth Induce Smoking?"[link]by Yutian Yang (Empirical Economics 2021) I use Chinese panel data to estimate the exogenous effect of economic growth on individuals' smoking behavior. By instrumenting the endogenous provincial GDP growth rate with a dummy variable indicating whether the province has a new leader, my results show that a higher economic growth rate reduces overall cigarette consumption, but does not reduce the overall smoking participation rate. In addition, a higher economic growth rate reduces cigarette consumption of male but not female. It reduces cigarette consumption of the lower-middle and senior age males, but does not significantly change consumption among the young males. Of these three groups, only the middle-aged males show a decrease in their smoking participation rate with higher economic growth. Overall, the Chinese data show that economic expansion reduces men's smoking amount. But the overall adjustment is intensive, rather than extensive. —Presented at European Society of Population Economics (ESPE) Annual Conference, University of Bath, 2019 June
"The Fiscal Impact Of Inter-Provincial Floating Population To The Developed Provinces In China" by Yannis Ioannides, Yutian Yang, 2016 Floating Population means internal migrants distinguished from the Household Population by the Chinese Hukou-system. These people migrate from undeveloped to developed regions to live as permanent residents but do not have Hukou registered in the place they wish to live in. Our research shows that, based on the data for 2009: (i) a person’s Hukou Type and their economic well-being are significantly correlated; (ii) the marginal fiscal impact of Floating Population with Urban Hukou is positive but that of those with Rural Hukou is hard to assess but possibly to be positive.