Wang Yutao
WANG YUTAO
Ph.D Candidate in Economics
I am a job market candidate and I will be available for interviews.
REFERENCES
Professor Christine Ho
Email: christineho@smu.edu.sg
Tel: +65 68085173
Professor Tomoki Fujii
Email: tfujii@smu.edu.sg
Tel: +65 68280279
WORKING PAPERS
“Social Institutions and Low Birth Rates”, with Christine Ho (Job Market Paper)
We document three cross-sectional stylized facts on labor supply and family formation. First, female labor force participation (LFP) and fertility rates are much lower in Eastern societies compared to Western economies. Second, labor hours and the gender-pay gap are much higher in the East than in the West. Third, parents spend very high amounts of time and money per child in Eastern societies. To account for these features, we develop and estimate a rich heterogeneous-agent model with endogenous marriage, fertility, labor supply, and time and money investment in children. Estimates using data from South Korea and the United States highlight the importance of gender norms and long work hours practices in driving down female LFP while child quality mores drive down fertility in South Korea. Our results suggest that a multi-pronged policy approach or reductions in the gender-pay gap may help boost both female LFP and fertility in East Asia.
RESEARCH PAPERS
“Family Size and Child Migration: Do Daughters Face Greater Trade-Offs than Sons?”, with Christine Ho and Sharon Xuejing Zuo, under review in The Journal of Human Resources
We show that, conditional on family size, rural boys and girls are equally likely to migrate with parents in China. Nevertheless, daughters’ migration may still be compromised because they tend to have more siblings in societies with strong son preference, and larger families are more likely to leave all children behind. We find that a one unit increase in sibship size decreases the probability that a daughter migrates by 12.5 percentage points—with stronger effects when migration restrictions are more stringent—but has negligible effects on sons. The results suggest that gender-neutral migration constraints may generate gendered family size trade-offs.