Research
Research Agenda and Working Papers
Working Paper · Submitted
Towards a Better Major Assignment: An Empirical Study with Students in China
with Xintong Han and Yan Zeng
This paper studies centralized major assignment in Chinese higher education using students' mock and official rank-order lists, entrance-exam records, and information about their application environment. We document how students revise their choices as they learn about competition for majors and estimate their preferences using discrete-choice methods.
We then use the estimated preferences to compare alternative assignment mechanisms through counterfactual analysis. The comparison evaluates welfare, first-choice placement, distributional outcomes, and the treatment of lower-ranked and female students. By connecting observed preference formation to mechanism performance, the paper provides an empirical market-design analysis of college major assignment.
Major assignment
Empirical analysis
Discrete choice
Mechanism comparison
Work in Progress
Progressive Choice Mechanisms in School Choice Problems
with Szilvia Pápai
This paper studies a family of school-choice mechanisms that varies how many options each student may access at each step. Under common priorities, the family connects Immediate Acceptance, intermediate Chinese parallel mechanisms, and Serial Dictatorship; under school-specific priorities, its fully permissive endpoint is student-proposing Deferred Acceptance. We characterize efficiency and how expanding choice opportunities changes manipulability, and we study the corresponding stability trade-offs.
Work in Progress
Bridging Theory and Evidence: How External Information Transforms Students' Application Decisions
This project investigates how information and application environments affect students' submitted preferences, assignment outcomes, and the empirical interpretation of preference-revelation behavior.
Selected Presentations
- False but Harmless? Misreporting under Strategy-Proof Matching, 18th Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare, University of Tokyo, 2026. Presentation slides.
- Progressive Choice Mechanisms in School Choice Problems, 14th Conference on Economic Design, University of Essex, 2025.
- Progressive Choice Mechanisms in School Choice Problems, 17th Meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare, Paris School of Economics, 2024.
- Towards a Better Major Assignment: An Empirical Study with Students in China, Concordia Economics Department Lunch Seminar, 2023.
- Towards a Better Major Assignment: An Empirical Study with Students in China, Urban and Education Economics Seminars, Shandong University, 2023.
- Towards a Better Major Assignment: An Empirical Study with Students in China, 13th Conference on Economic Design, Universitat de Girona, 2023.
- Towards a Better Major Assignment: An Empirical Study with Students in China, 18th CIREQ Ph.D. Students' Conference, Concordia University, 2023.