Working Papers
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Less Drinking, More Parenting: Evidence from Workplace Alcohol Bans in China
Submitted (with Xinyi Shen)
How do informal obligations at work affect family life? We study work-related drinking, a pervasive form of professional socializing in China, and its consequences for parental time. We exploit the staggered introduction of provincial alcohol bans that prohibited public-sector employees from drinking at official functions and on weekdays. Using seven waves of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) from 2010 to 2022, we implement a triple-differences design that compares public-sector households with private-sector counterparts across provinces before and after the bans. We find that the bans reduce drinking among public-sector men by one-third and improve their health without affecting smoking. More importantly, we find that the bans increase the time public-sector fathers spend with their children by 26%, with no comparable increase among private-sector fathers. These findings still hold after a series of robustness checks. Heterogeneity analyses suggest that the effects are more pronounced among urban households and families with multiple children. Our study highlights that alcohol-centered work obligations crowd out fathers' time at home, and that curbing them reallocates a substantial amount of that time toward children.
Publications
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Asian Climate Policies and Way Forward
Accepted at International Review of Environmental and Resource Economics (with Guojun He)
Work in Progress
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Curriculum Centralization and the Allocation of Human Capital
(with Xinyi Shen)
Pre-doctoral Work
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Ultra-High Voltage Transmission and Slowing Coal Power Expansion:
Evidence from City-Level Air Quality in China
(with Fanyu Wang and Guojun He)
Over the past two decades, China has made substantial investments in the Ultra-High Voltage (UHV) transmission network to address geographical energy mismatch by harnessing energy resources from the western and northern areas. Despite its scale, UHV expansion has been controversial due to its high costs and uncertain returns. This paper provides a comprehensive evaluation of the environmental impacts of UHV connection on local ambient air quality and identifies the underlying mechanisms by examining its effects on electricity production at the extensive and intensive margins. Exploiting the staggered rollout of 28 UHV projects through 2020, which connect 48 recipient cities and 13 source cities, we find that UHV connection leads to a 5.68 µg/m³ reduction in ambient SO2 concentration in recipient cities, representing a 32% decline relative to the pre-connection average, with no significant SO2 change in source cities. This pattern suggests a net reduction in population exposure to SO2 pollution. The primary mechanism operates at the extensive margin. UHV connection reduces new coal power plant entry by 49% and new coal power capacity by 47% in recipient cities. In contrast, we find no significant effects on the emissions or output of existing power plants, indicating that SO2 reductions are driven primarily by the discouraged investment in new coal power infrastructure rather than changes in existing plant operations. Overall, our results show that UHV transmission delivers substantial environmental benefits by altering long-run investment incentives and locking in cleaner electricity supply paths.
Presenting: CU SDEV Colloquium (2026-04); CES NA Conference (2026-03)