People
Shing-Yi Wang
Dr. Shing-Yi Wang is an Associate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at Wharton. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University and her B.A. from Wellesley College. Prior to joining Wharton, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at New York University.
She specializes in development economics and labor economics with a focus on microeconomic issues related to property rights and migration. While much of her research is on China, she has also examined questions in India, Mongolia, and the United Arab Emirates. She is currently a co-editor at the Journal of Human Resources.
Selected Publications
(2020). “Firms & Trade Improving management through worker feedback: Auto-manufacturing in China.” VoxDev
Letting workers provide feedback on their managers leads to significant reductions in worker turnover and increases in team productivity
There are large differences in firm productivity between developing and developed countries (Bloom and Reenen 2007), and prior research has demonstrated that management practices may be key to explaining these differences (Bloom et al. 2013). This may be driven by the fact that firms differ widely in the relationships between low-level managers and upper-level management.
On one hand, economic theory suggests that financial incentives for low-level managers may be key to aligning the interests of these managers with upper-level management (Grossman and Hart 1983, Holmstrom and Milgrom 1987). However, recent randomised controlled studies have shown that financial incentives are not the only thing that is important: providing managers with training, feedback, or consulting may be effective in improving managerial performance (Bruhn et al. 2018, Schoar 2013, Kelly et al. 2014, Bloom et al. 2013).
(May 2020). Property Rights, Land Misallocation and Agricultural Efficiency in China. The Review of Economic Studies.
This paper examines the impact of a property rights reform in rural China that allowed farmers to lease out their land. We find the reform led to increases in land rental activity in rural households.
Consistent with a model of transaction costs in land markets, our results indicate that the formalization of leasing rights resulted in a redistribution of land toward more productive farmers. Consequently, the aggregate productivity of land increased significantly.
We also find that the reform increased the responsiveness of land allocation across crops to changes in crop prices.