Huayan Geng (耿华彦）
Economics, Binghamton University (SUNY).
Job Market Paper
"Estimation and Inference of Treatment Effects Using a New Panel Data Approach: Measuring the Impact of US SYG Law", with Qiankun Zhou.
Abstract: This paper proposes a new panel data approach to evaluate the impact of social policy. We consider a classical panel model with interactive fixed effects (IFE), which allows the cross-sectional dependence through the presence of some (unobserved) common factors. The new approach com bines the ideas of Pesaran (2006) to estimate the panel model with IFE and Hsiao et al. (2012) to construct counterfactuals. Compared to the existing methods such as Synthetic Control Method (SCM) (Abadie et al. (2010)) and the Generalized SCM (GSCM) (Xu (2017)), our new approach possesses the advantages of: (1) there is no need to impose constraints on both the observables and unobservables; (2) the number of parameters to be estimated in the model is greatly reduced. Moreover, we establish the asymptotic properties for the average treatment effect (ATE) over post treatment periods, which can be used to obtain statistical inference for the significance of the ATE or to construct confidence band for the treatment effects in the post-treatment periods. Monte Carlo simulations show that our approach works remarkably well and has very desirable finite sample performance in terms of estimation bias, mean square of errors, and empirical rejection frequency. We apply our method to study the impact of the US Stand Your Ground (SYG) law on the state-level murder rate, and we find, in general, the SYG law has increased the murder rate for the states adopting the SYG law.
Working Paper
"Evaluating the Trade War Impacts on U.S. Soybean Exports to China", with Bowen Chen
Abstract: China imposed 25% tariffs on imported soybeans from the U.S. amid the trade war in 2018. Since China is the largest buyer of U.S. soybeans in the international market, the tariffs were expected to result in dire economic consequences on U.S. soybean farmers. In response, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a trade aid package valued at 12 billion dollars in 2018 to compensate farmers for losses in agricultural trade with China, and the payments to soybean farmers took the lion’s share. However, there have been arguments about whether soybean farmers have been overcompensated by the trade aid package for the trade losses due to China’s retaliatory tariffs or not. In this article, we estimate impacts of the trade war on the U.S. soybean exports to China in 2018 using a reduced-form and natural experimental research design based on bilateral trade data during 2001–2018. We show that the trade war likely reduced the soybean exports to China by 23.6 million tonnes in 2018, and the implied payment rate for soybean farmers is slightly higher than the actual payment rate used by the U.S. government. We also show that once taking the increased soybean exports to other countries into account, the payment rate for soybean farmers is 45% lower than the actual payment rate, and the associated total payments to soybean farmers are 3.3 billion dollars lower than the actual total payments.