Research
Job Market Paper
The Incidence of Semiconductor Export Controls: Access Risk, Compliance, and Strategic Capacity
This paper studies how U.S. export controls on advanced semiconductors affect trade, welfare, and technological capacity across the global semiconductor supply chain. Using monthly bilateral trade data, I document a sharp decline in U.S. advanced-chip exports to China after the October 2022 controls and heterogeneous responses among Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, highlighting the importance of third-country suppliers in the incidence of the policy.I develop a four-region dynamic general equilibrium model in which advanced chips are essential inputs in high-technology production and investment goods that build AI compute capital. China can substitute between U.S. and third-country suppliers, while Japan, Korea, and Taiwan choose their compliance with U.S. controls endogenously, trading off current access to Chinese demand against future access to U.S. technology.
The quantitative results show that export controls have much larger effects on technological capacity than on aggregate consumption. Under the benchmark permanent-control counterfactual, China’s compute investment falls 8.5 percent in the first year, its long-run compute stock falls 33 percent, and high-technology output falls 16.4 percent, while its consumption-equivalent welfare loss is about 0.4 percent. The largest welfare burden instead falls on third-country chip producers, whose welfare declines by about 0.51 percent. This asymmetric incidence arises from a third-country compliance dilemma: stronger compliance sacrifices access to Chinese demand, while weaker compliance erodes access to U.S. technology and raises future production costs.
Publications
Green Innovation and Maturity Mismatch: Evidence from China
Finance Research Letters, 2025, 85(C): 108124
This paper examines how corporate green innovation affects firms’ debt maturity structures using panel data on Chinese listed firms from 2007–2023.
We find that green innovation significantly exacerbates debt maturity mismatch, driven by long investment horizons, elevated financial risk, and short-term performance constraints.
The results are robust to instrumental-variable approaches, propensity-score matching, entropy balancing, and policy shocks from carbon-trading pilots.
Working Papers
Selected Work in Progress
Multinational Semiconductor Firms and the Geography of Innovation
This project studies the geographic allocation of R&D by multinational firms in the semiconductor memory industry.
Using firm-level production, capacity, plant, and patent data for the DRAM industry from 1974–2004, we document that innovation is concentrated among multinational firms, that firms replicate internal technology structures across countries, and that R&D entry increases local knowledge spillovers.
We develop a multi-country endogenous growth model in which heterogeneous firms choose both the scale and location of R&D. The model is used to assess whether firms under-expand geographically relative to the efficient allocation and how policies such as the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act affect industry growth, productivity, and the global stock of knowledge.
The Transition from Gas Cars to EVs
This project studies how electric-vehicle adoption reshapes the retail gasoline market through consumer demand, station pricing, and exit decisions.
We combine daily prices for roughly 1,700 Chicago-area gas stations with a geolocation panel of about 150,000 consumers, whose individual station visits we construct from raw GPS records.
We estimate a random-coefficients demand model in which consumers trade off price against the detour required to visit a station. We use the model to study pricing and station exit as EV penetration increases, including fuel deserts, changes in spatial competition, and distributional welfare effects.
Export Controls and Chinese Innovation: Endogenous Advanced-Chip Development
This project extends my model of semiconductor export controls by allowing China to respond through endogenous domestic innovation. In the model, a Chinese producer undertakes breakthrough research that raises the probability of developing a production-ready advanced-chip technology and, after success, process research that improves manufacturing productivity. I embed this innovation margin into the permanent-control framework of my current paper. Chinese advanced chips enter China’s sourcing basket as an additional domestic source, while the rest of the environment retains the core features of the baseline model: Leontief chip bottlenecks in high-technology production, Armington sourcing across suppliers, AI compute-capital accumulation, and endogenous compliance by third-country chip producers. The project is designed to study whether export controls that create short-run bottlenecks can also induce domestic technological catch-up in the targeted economy, and under what conditions such induced innovation mitigates—or possibly reverses—the policy’s long-run effects.
Social Credit Level and Corporate Leverage Manipulation: Evidence from China
with Ruiqi Sun and Tianyu Zhang
Using China’s Social Credit System pilot as a quasi-natural experiment, this paper studies the impact of social credit on corporate leverage manipulation.
Employing a difference-in-differences design on Chinese listed firms from 2007–2022, we find that higher social credit significantly reduces leverage manipulation. The effect operates through improved information transparency, expanded credit access, and reduced overleveraging.