Bio
I am a doctoral student in the Economics Department at the National University of Singapore.
I am a labor economist working on applied topics related to discrimination, mobility, education, wage setting, marriage, and occupation choices. I use administrative data, scrapped data, and survey data.
Together with Cao Jingman and Yang Shuo, I help run the NUS Applied Economics Student Workshop.
Curriculum Vitae (Updated April 2025)
Email: liaoliang.zhang@u.nus.edu
Office: AS1-01-02, NUS
Working Papers
(with Qinyue Luo and Xinhan Zhang)
Current Version: April 2025
Submitted
Abstract (click to expand): We analyze explicit age discrimination in hiring decisions and job seekers' responses in the Chinese labor market, using a large-scale dataset of job postings with ad-level group characteristics of applicants. In nearly 48\% of postings, employers explicitly exclude certain age groups, with significant variation across firm types, sizes, industries, and occupations. We show that employers' explicit age requests are shaped by statistical and taste-based discrimination reflected in job skill requirements and ageist language, as well as constraints such as expected processing costs, and competition in labor demand. Our findings align with a labor demand model where employers decide whether to consider (undesired) candidates from an additional age group based on their search factors and preferences. On the supply side, we leverage the distribution of applicant characteristics such as age and education level to show that age requirements are interpreted as signals rather than strict barriers. Nonetheless, explicit age restrictions substantially alter the applicant pool by attracting younger applicants while discouraging skilled workers.
RFBerlin Discussion Paper
(with Edmund Malesky, Martin Mattsson and Khoa Vu)
Current Version: March 2025
Submitted
Abstract (click to expand): Education and corruption are negatively correlated at the cross-national level, but little is known about the causal relationship between the two. We combine data on Vietnam's expansion of universities with detailed survey data on experiences of corruption from over 170,000 respondents in 320 districts across 12 years. Using an age cohort difference-in-differences approach, we show that cohorts exposed to the university expansion are 64.8% more likely to have a university degree. However, this increase neither translates into a lower propensity to pay bribes nor an increased propensity to denounce corrupt officials. Instead, we find that education increases the propensity to pay bribes at the individual level. The mechanism for this increase that is most consistent with our data is that education raises household income and higher income leads to more bribe payments.
SSRN
Personal
Best Yield so far for my farming business.
Website: I am grateful to Gautam Rao for sharing this website design. Here is the GitHub repository. A short guide to acutally implementing it is coming soon.
