Jiancong Liu

My primary research interests lie in international trade and development economics, with a focus on firms and market structure responses to trade shocks. I also hold keen interests in entrepreneurial finance and taxation. I combine reduced-form techniques and quantitative models in my work. I'll be on the job market in AY. 2024-2025 and attend ASSA San Francesco. 

JOB MARKET PAPER

Pro-Competitive Gains of Trade Facilitation: Evidence from China

This paper investigates how trade facilitation affects firms asymmetrically. We explore China's "Single Window" reform, which streamlined administrative procedures in international trade, to elucidate within-country distributional effects. Leveraging the by-province roll-out of the reform, we find decreasing per-shipment fixed costs and increasing export value at the aggregate level due to quantity growth. The falling trade costs encourages entry of new firms, intensifies competition, thus leads to null, if any negative, impacts on top firms. Such pro-competition effects not only improve domestic allocation efficiency, the consequent declining export prices also signify welfare gains to international buyers. Our findings provide vital empirical insights for the real impacts of the trade facilitation reform.

WORKING PAPERS

• Ao, Y., & Liu, J. – "Pro-Competitive Gains of Trade Facilitation: Evidence from China"
• Liu, J.  – "Biased Tax Enforcement as A Trade Barrier: The Role of Mandated Transparency at Customs"
• Liu, J., Ding, Y., Matta, M., & Xu, H. – "Does Fraudulent Science Hurt Biomedical Entrepreneurship? Evidence From Venture Capital"
• Liu, J., Auboin, M., Haile, B., & Wang, Y. – "Trade Finance and Exports: Firm-Level Evidence from China". WTO Staff Working Paper: Research ERSD-2024-05