Yongwei Nian 年永威
Welcome to my website! I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Economics at Peking University. Here is my CV.
Fields of Interest:
Development Economics; Environmental Economics
Education:
PhD in Economics and Finance, Bocconi University, 2024
MA in Finance, Peking University, 2019
BA in Economics, Sun Yat-sen University, 2016
Contact:
Office 517, School of Economics, Peking University
yongweinian@gmail.com (primary)
yw.nian@pku.edu.cn (institutional)
Publications
I test the role of economic incentives and command and control in reducing agricultural fires, a major source of air pollution in most rural regions across the world caused by burning crop residues after harvest. To tackle data shortage, I use high-resolution satellite data to construct a fine measure of agricultural fires as well as other geographic characteristics at 1 km × 1 km resolution for China. Using the staggered arrival of biomass power plants, which purchase crop residues as production inputs from nearby areas, as a shock to economic incentives, I find a more than 30% drop in agricultural fires in the vicinity of a plant after its opening relative to areas farther away. Such drop cannot be explained by structural transformation, migration, or enhanced regulation near the plant, and is consistent with an incentive-based explanation. I then examine the effectiveness of a command and control policy that bans agricultural fires within 15 km of airports. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design, I find no evidence that such a policy works.
Go with the Politician with Chunyang Wang (PKU) [Paper]
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy May 2023
Chinese local leaders are frequently moved across prefectures. By combining local leader rotation data and comprehensive firm land parcel purchase data across prefectures from 2006 to 2016, this paper examines how firm-politician connections affect resource allocation and finds that a firm headquartered in a leader's previous work prefecture purchases three times more land parcels in that leader's new governing prefecture than the prefecture-year mean, at half the unit prices. Identification is from within-firm-year variation in various prefectures through exogenous politician rotation. Land usage efficiency is lower for these follower firms' land parcels. Land allocation distortion is also economically sizable.
Selected Working Papers
Reciprocity and State Capacity with Yu Luo (SWUFE) and Ming-ang Zhang (CUFE) [Paper]
Submitted
Top-down Monitoring and Bureaucratic Efforts
Culture and Bureaucratic Behaviors with Cindy Shen (Stanford) and Zhengyang Zhou (UBC)