洪以儒 (Yi-Ju Hung)
I am an assistant professor in the economics department at National Chung Cheng University. I work on various topics in labor economics, economic geography, and economic history. My research focuses on inequality, migration, and their interactions.
Email: yijuhung2231@gmail.com
Working Papers:
Immigration and Economic Opportunity [SSRN]
How children of U.S.-born adapt to immigration-induced local changes is empirically ambiguous and understudied. Uncovering the impact of exposure to immigrants during childhood helps us understand the dynamic responses to immigration and the implications for intergenerational mobility. To study the impact, I link children of U.S.-born in each of the 1900 to 1920 U.S. censuses to their adulthood years in the following censuses until 1940. I instrument immigration’s destination choice by exploiting the disparities of preexisting immigration settlement patterns and the variation in their arrivals from 1900 to 1920. I find that immigration induces children of U.S.-born to accumulate more human capital. However, children of higher-skilled fathers adapt better and benefit more than their peers. The findings indicate that though immigration induces skill upgrading, it increases U.S.-born cross-generation skill persistence. The incentive to specialize may explain the skill upgrading; exposure to immigrants during childhood encourages children of U.S.-born to specialize in less immigrant-intensive and higher-skilled occupations. Mobility expands specialization opportunities; immigration-induced rural-to-urban migration makes higher-skilled jobs more accessible for the U.S.-born.
Presentation: National Chung Cheng University, CIER, All California Labor Economics Conference (ACLEC), CSU Long Beach, Data-Intensive Research Conference (NDIRA) (Poster), EHA (Poster), USC, SSHA, Southern California Graduate Conference in Applied Economics (SOCAE)
Engines of Uplift: The Local Returns of HBCUs for Black Americans in the South, 1870–1940
(joint with Jorge De la Roca)
This study examines the causal impact of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) on the educational and occupational outcomes of Black Americans in the U.S. South from 1870 to 1940. Using digitized data on HBCU founding years and locations, along with full-count U.S. censuses, we employ a staggered difference-in-differences approach to compare counties that experienced their first HBCU openings to those that did not. HBCU establishments led to significant increases in youth enrollment rates among Black American males and shifted occupational composition from agriculture to higher-skilled non-manual jobs. HBCUs also reduced racial literacy gaps by 5.3–5.6 percentage points. The findings highlight HBCUs' critical role in advancing Black socioeconomic mobility during the postbellum era. (JEL I23, J15, J24, N31, N32)
Presentation: Taiwan Economic Research Workshop (TER), National Cheng Kung University, TCUS Economics Conference, University of Padova (dSEA), MEA
Wealth Transfer Tax and Wealth Inequality (joint with Da-Kai Wu) [SSRN] (submitted)
This study investigates the impact of wealth transfer tax on wealth inequality and finds a negative association, leveraging the 2009 tax cut in Taiwan’s estate and gift taxes. We implement the synthetic control method to estimate the tax cut’s causal impact on inequality. The estate tax cut enlarges the inequality; the top one percent’s wealth share rises from 0.690 to 2.189 percentage points in six years after the tax reform. The tax cut-induced expanding inheritance inequality supports our findings. We also show that changes in tax avoidance behaviors may explain the immediate and part of the long-run impacts estimated on inequality.
Presentation: Taiwan Economic Association Annual Conference (TEA)
The Great Migration's Impact on Southern Inequality (joint with Jack Chapel)
This paper studies the Great Migration—the early 20th-century mass migration of Black Americans out of the U.S. South—and its impact on Southern local labor markets. To isolate the impacts of migration from potentially correlated economic impacts of local push factors, we construct a shift-share style “demand-pull” instrument, exploiting variation in preexisting Southern out-migration patterns in 1900-10 and labor demand changes in the North in 1910–1940. We estimate that counties with one percentile higher out-of-South migration during 1910–1940 had $0.03 (0.5%) higher average Black weekly wages in 1940. We find no effects on White wages, resulting in a reduction in the racial wage gap. Reduced Black labor supply and improved human capital accumulation are investigated as potential mechanisms. The results provide novel evidence of how the Great Migration impacted the Southern communities migrants left.
Presentation: MEA
Selected Work in Progress:
Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility
Immigration and Internal Migration
Compete Opportunities: New Waves and Early Arrivals Immigrants
