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Zoe Zhang

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Contact details

Telephone:

Email: Qianxue dot Zhang at warwick dot ac dot uk

Room: S0.78

Advice & feedback hours: Wednesday 2-3 pm and Thursday 11-12 am.


Related links



Please see my personal website here.

I come from China and my Chinese name is Qianxue (张千雪). I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Warwick, UK. I am on the 2023/2024 job market.

My research interests are:

  • International Trade
  • Macroeconomics
  • Growth and Innovation

My letter writers are Prof. Roger FarmerLink opens in a new window, Prof. Dennis NovyLink opens in a new window and Dr. Marta SantamariaLink opens in a new window.


Breaking Borders: The Impact of Knowledge Diffusion on the Gains from Trade (Job Market Paper)

Abstract: How does international knowledge sharing affect trade patterns, economic growth, and welfare across the globe? This paper answers this question by estimating a novel dynamic trade model where heterogeneous firms innovate. I first document that knowledge diffusion and technology adoption are two key channels for acquiring foreign knowledge using comprehensive Chinese firm-level data on trade, patents, and citations. Based on these findings, I develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where firms learn from sellers when importing and choose to adopt foreign technologies when exporting. In the model, diffusion enhances productivity for all firms, and adoption further amplifies these gains by boosting the productivity of the most efficient firms. I structurally estimate the model with bilateral trade flows for the global economy. I find that knowledge diffusion substantially increases the gains from trade in all economies, ranging from 0.2% to 8.7%. However, foreign technology adoption can reduce welfare in knowledge-abundant countries as their technological advantages get eroded. Technology adoption therefore alters the conventional gains from trade, with developed countries potentially benefiting from higher trade barriers.

Structural Transformation and Intrahousehold Bargaining: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa (with Jiaqi Li)

[funded by STEG PhD grant 1286]

Abstract: A standard structural change model with intra-household bargaining, connecting Ngai and Petrongolo (2017) and Blundell et al. (2005), predicts that moving out of agriculture increases the female bargaining position by an increase in female-to-male wage ratio due to the rising service sector. However, we reject this prediction using rich micro-level data from Sub-Saharan Africa with both two-way fixed effects estimation and instrumental variable approach. Structural transformation has significantly widened the gender employment gap in SSA. To reconcile this fact, we build a two-sector general equilibrium model with social stigma against women working in the service sector to show that structural transformation can reduce female bargaining power if the social stigma is larger than a threshold jointly determined by female comparative advantage and substitutability of labor input between genders. We emphasize that structural transformation may be insufficient for gender equality; active policies are needed to ensure equal gender access to service sector jobs.

Estimating non-balanced growth paths: three-factor model and structural change

Abstract: This paper proposes a new method of estimating non-stationary nonlinear dynamic general equilibrium models with an application in the structural transformation context. By combining different sectoral growth rates with different factor intensities, I construct a three-sector general equilibrium model that generates a hump-shaped path for the size of the manufacturing sector while replicating the observed pattern of increasing and decreasing shares in services and agriculture. Using data for the United States and Sweden over the past decades, I implement a relaxation algorithm to solve the model for non-stationary paths of sectoral shares for given parameter values and then estimate the best fit for the model’s parameters. A counterfactual exercise for China shows the importance of trade in explaining structural change. This method can be easily generalized to solve other similar problems.


Work in progress

Green Transformation or Market Exodus? The Impact of China's Environmental Regulations on Firms in Sub-Saharan Africa (with Jiancong Liu)


Publication

The Hubei lockdown and its global impacts via supply chains, Review of International Economics 2022, 30 (4),10871109. Matlab code

Abstract: This paper argues that the lockdown of Hubei province in China due to the Coronavirus outbreak provides a natural experiment to study the importance of China’s role in global value chains. Since the lockdown started during the Lunar New Year, Hubei’s migrant workers who went home could not return to workplaces in other provinces, resulting in a massive labor supply shock. I feed the supply shock through a Ricardian model with intermediate goods and sectoral linkages to study trade and welfare effects across several economies. While welfare in China is the most negatively affected, the shock also has sizeable negative implications for the US and the UK.


Teaching

2019/2020

EC107 Economics 1 (tutorial) Office hours: Friday 2-4 pm, S0.86

2020/2021

EC107 Economics 1 (tutorial) Office hours: Monday 2-4 pm, Online.

2021/2022

EC312 International Economics (tutorial)

EC107 Economics 1 (tutorial)

Office hours: Wednesday 2 - 3 pm, Online, and Thursday 11- 12 am in person.


MSc Helpdesk 2022:

Please book a slot first and inform me of your questions before joining the meeting.

Tuesdays (5th, 12th, 19th, 26th July) - 9:00 - 10:00 am.

Tuesdays (2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd, 30th August) - 11:00 - 12:00 am

Tuesday 6th September: 3:00 - 5:00 pm