Socio-Political Institutions and Household Finance
This is a project co-authored with Yue Qian. We study how socio-political structures shape financial participation in households. We focus on both spouses’ educational pairing and government policies that differentiate urban and migrant residents, and we investigate the effect of these factors on household holdings of stocks and bonds in China. Our findings demonstrate that 1) urban households with urban residency are much more likely to hold financial products than migrant households living in urban areas and 2) migrant households with two less-educated couples are particularly less likely to make financial investments.
State Ownership, Economic Openness, and The Recruitment of Female Directors
In collaboration with Yongren Shi and Linzhuo Li, we investigate how firms’ state-ownership and governance structures decide the recruitment of female directors using a sample of China’s public companies. As the ratio of female directors has consistently but slowly increased over years, we debate on the cause of such increases between 1) the fact that firms are increasingly open to global markets and they thus adopt the ethics of gender equality and 2) the protection from fierce competitions in the conservative state sectors.