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 helped run the NUS Applied Economics Student Workshop, which is now refashioned into NUS APplied Economics eXplorations (APEX).
Curriculum Vitae (Updated May 2026)
Email: liaoliang.zhang@u.nus.edu
Working Papers
(with Qinyue Luo and Xinhan Zhang)
Current Version: April 2026
Submitted
Abstract (click to expand): We analyze explicit age discrimination in an online job market and job seekers' responses to it in China, using nearly 8 million job postings with ad-level group characteristics of applicants. In nearly half of job postings, employers explicitly state age restrictions and often exclude older applicants. To rationalize this, we develop a dynamic game in which older workers incur a disutility from employment at a biased firm, while biased employers trade off a larger applicant pool against higher screening costs. Consistent with the model's predictions, empirical results show that age restrictions encourage younger workers but discourage middle-aged and older workers, although some ineligible candidates still apply to high-wage or high-skill positions. Firms are more likely to impose age limits when jobs demand high work intensity, low skill levels, or when they face greater hiring costs and weaker market competition. Our results highlight that explicit age preferences, by altering both the composition of applicants and the costs of screening, can sustain discriminatory hiring equilibria even in competitive labor markets.
RFBerlin Discussion Paper
(with Edmund Malesky, Martin Mattsson and Khoa Vu)
Current Version: May 2026
Revise and resubmit, Journal of Public Economics
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 newly-collected data on timing and locations of Vietnam's national expansion of universities with detailed survey data on experiences of corruption from over 170,000 respondents in 320 districts across 12 years. Using staggered difference-in-differences, we show that cohorts exposed to the university expansion are 78% more likely to have a university education. However, this increase neither translates into fewer individuals being affected by corruption nor increases the propensity to denounce corrupt officials. Instead, we find that education increases exposure to corruption 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 Xinyue Lin for creating and Gautam Rao for sharing this website design. Here is the GitHub repository. Here is a short guide to implement it.
