Zichen Deng

I study health and environmental economics. My research is inspired by the belief that expenditures in health, food and clean air represent an investment in the most valuable resource we have, the people itself. Specifically, my current work has focused on looking into the implementation, the effectiveness and the mechanism of policies which can provide those basic needs. I am also interested in addressing econometric issues motivated by empirical work.
I am on the job market in 2019-20 and will be available for interviews at 2019 European Job Market and ASSA 2020 meeting.

Job market paper

Clearing the Smog: Monitors, Accountability and Pollution Reduction in China with Sebastian Axbard Despite ambitious environmental laws in many countries across the globe, the enforcement of these regulations is often weak. Holding government officials accountable for this lack of enforcement is in turn often marred by poor information about environmental quality. In this paper, we study whether better environmental monitoring can solve this issue and improve the effectiveness of policy. We focus on air pollution in China and investigate the impact of a nationwide monitoring program. Using identification strategies that exploit strict assignment criteria set up by the central government, we show that an additional air pollution monitor reduced satellite-based measures of pollution by 2-3% and increased enforcement of air-pollution regulations by 20%. These effects are driven by local officials that face strong incentives to reduce pollution and are stronger when there is limited scope for data manipulation – suggesting that better quality information can strengthen accountability of implementing officials and improve policy outcomes.

Working papers

A Bit of Salt, A Trace of Life: gender norms and the impact of a salt iodization program on human capital formation with Maarten Lindeboom; reject and resubmit Winner of the 1st prize for best paper at the Essen Health Conference 2018.
Data Combination using Heterogeneous Samples: with application to long-term effects of early-life undernutrition
Available upon request

(Pre-PhD) Publications

2019

Job Search, Liquidity Shock and Post-match Quality of Rural to Urban Migrants in China with Yuanyuan Chen forthcoming in Journal of Labor Research