Contact Information
Department of Economics
Northwestern University
2211 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Phone: +1(872)-308-0254
Email: JingyuanWang@u.northwestern.edu, jingyuan.wang.jw3232@yale.edu
Personal Website: https://sites.google.com/view/wang-jingyuan/
Education
Ph.D., Economics, Northwestern University, 2018-2024 (expected)
M.S., Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University, 2014-2016
B.S., Environmental Science and Engineering, Peking University, 2010-2014
B.A., Economics, Peking University, 2010-2014
Primary Fields of Specialization
Industrial Organization
Secondary Fields of Specialization
Environmental and Energy Economics
Curriculum Vitae
Job Market Paper
Subsidizing Industry Growth in a Market with Lemons: Evidence from the Chinese Electric Vehicle Market
with Jianwei Xing [SSRN]
Consumer subsidies are common policies to foster growth in emerging green industries, such as the electric vehicle (EV) industry. Ideally, such policies can expand the market and improve welfare by promoting firm entry and inducing technology spillovers to related industries. However, a poorly designed subsidy can attract “lemon” entrants with low and imperfectly observed quality, undermining the industry’s reputation and dampening industry growth. Using Chinese EV market data from 2012 to 2018, this paper examines how subsidies affect the growth of a nascent industry. We develop a structural model of vehicle demand, firm entry and expansion, and EV reputation dynamics to analyze the subsidy’s equilibrium impact. Our results suggest that the net welfare impact of the subsidy is nearly zero and that the reputation impact reduces the subsidy benefits by 10.8%. Decreasing the subsidy level can improve policy efficiency and mitigate the reputation impact, while stringency in the attribute-based subsidy can serve as a screening tool that effectively filters out lemons. This paper develops a framework for designing green industrial policies, highlighting the critical but often neglected role of the reputation channel.
Other Papers
Estimating the Elasticity to Real Time Pricing: Evidence from the Spanish Electricity Market
with Natalia Fabra, Dave Rapson, and Mar Reguant
AEA Papers & Proceedings, 2021 May, vol. 111, pp. 425-429
The Distributional Impacts of Real-Time Pricing
with Michael Cahana, Natalia Fabra, and Mar Reguant (submitted)
When designing electricity tariffs, efficiency considerations favor switching from time-invariant to real-time prices (RTP). Using hourly electricity consumption data, we analyze its distributional implications through a novel approach that infers individual household income from zip-code-level income and household-level electricity consumption. We find that RTP is slightly regressive, i.e., it increases the bills of low-income households by 0.5% on average, and 5% among those who lose from the switch, who are overrepresented in the lowest quintiles. This finding is explained by the correlation between income and household consumption patterns, electric appliances, and locations. Although the distributional impacts are economically small, counterfactuals show that they might worsen as high-income groups adopt demand-response technologies in the future. We propose a re-design of electricity tariffs that overcomes the regressive effects of RTP while preserving its efficiency properties.
Natural Gas to Complement Solar Intermittency: Long-run Consequences of Policy Interventions
with Tomas Wilner (New draft coming soon)
Natural gas has become a pivotal technology in the energy transition, as it can complement renewable generation at a lower emission rate compared to alternative fossil fuels. In countries with scarce natural gas reserves, firms might exhibit insufficient import levels relative to governmental preferences. In this paper, we study several policies designed to incentivize larger natural gas orders and examine their impact on long-term renewable entry. Our research is conducted in Chile, a notable player in the adoption of solar energy, which implemented a novel policy to encourage the procurement of natural gas. We find that, even though the policy displaces coal usage, it simultaneously increases natural gas imports to such an extent that it counterbalances its positive effects on emissions, with a net pollution cost of $20 million per year. The removal of this policy would not only result in a short-term reduction in emissions but also stimulate increased solar energy adoption in the long run by 10%. Among the policies we examined, the implementation of a carbon price emerges as one of the best choices, as it elevates natural gas imports, lowers emissions in the short run by $191 million annually, and maximizes solar energy entry in the long term by 54%.
Works in Progress
Incentivizing Sustainable Charging: Evidence from Real-Time Electric Vehicle Big Data
with Jianwei Xing
This paper investigates how government policies can better incentivize electric vehicle (EV) drivers and optimize electricity usage for EV charging. Utilizing a unique dataset of over 18 million real-world driving and charging records from 10,000 EVs in Beijing, an EV megacity, we analyze consumer responses to changes in charging pricing and infrastructure provision. We document distinct charging behaviors and employ a single-agent dynamic model to assess the impact of time-of-use (TOU) pricing and charging infrastructure policies on charging demand and grid load. Our findings highlight consumer heterogeneity, revealing different driver types–from routine commuters to flexible, price-sensitive users–react differently to policy interventions. These insights are crucial for designing effective, targeted policies that reduce grid strain, promote renewable energy integration, and encourage sustainable EV transition.
Estimating the Global Impacts of Climate Change on Suicide Rates
with Tamma Carleton, Jaecheol Lee, and Kelton Minor
Growing evidence links climate change to rising suicide rates, yet the mechanisms remain under-discussed. Using a new dataset that combines global country-level suicide rates with age- and gender-specific data at a sub-national scale from 46 countries, we empirically examine the relationships between climate and suicide. We further explore two main mechanisms through which climate influences suicide, leveraging detailed individual-level suicide records. First, temperature can directly affect brain chemistry, influencing emotional control and increasing tendencies for self-harm. Second, climate change can reduce household incomes, leading to higher suicide rates, especially in agriculturally-dependent developing regions. Furthermore, using high-resolution DAMIP climate models, we simulate a scenario without the influence of modern greenhouse gas emissions to estimate potential suicide rates in a preindustrial climate setting.
Teaching
Teaching Assistant: Microeconomics (Ph.D. core course), Economics of Energy (undergraduate), Introduction to Applied Econometrics (undergraduate)
Award: Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award, 2022-2023
Selected students’ comments:
- “Jingyuan was an amazing TA. She was excellent at breaking down the class content into simpler steps and always explained things slowly and clearly.”
- “Her review session were super helpful to consolidate learning and to summarize some of the key concepts. Her handouts were also a great reference for how to prove certain things and under what conditions certain concepts hold.”
- “Strong interest, preparedness, and presentation of material. Pretty good at answering questions by first explaining intuitive reasoning, then quantitative results”
- “Very friendly and very patient answering questions. I am also grateful that she welcomed questions that went beyond the scope of the course, giving detailed, meticulously written responses.”
Download Teaching Evaluations (PDF)
Reference
Prof. Mar Reguant (Committee Chair)
Prof. Robert Porter
Prof. Vivek Bhattacharya
Prof. Gaston Illanes