About
I am an assistant professor in management and strategy with a joint appointment in economics at HKU Business School. My research covers topics such as labor market structure, boundary of the firm, money and barter, and housing. Here is my CV. You can reach me at mbwong@hku.hk or DM me on Twitter.
If you’re a student interested looking for RA opportunities, I’m occasionally hiring. Email me if interested!
Working Papers
(with Duoxi Li)
Last Updated: November 2022
Abstract (click to expand): We develop and test a model of labor market dynamics with domestic outsourcing, productivity shocks, and endogenous separations. In the model, outsourcing may reduce worker rents, smooth labor demand, or both. Depending on the relative strengths of these two effects, outsourcing has different effects on worker hazard into non-employment. We use comprehensive administrative data on security guards and cleaners from Brazil to quantify the two effects. The estimates suggest that outsourcing significantly smoothed labor demand among security guards but did not significantly reduce their rents. By contrast, outsourcing had both demand-smoothing and large rent-stripping effects on the lower-wage occupation of cleaners.
(with Mayara Felix)
Last Updated: December 2021
Abstract (click to expand): We analyze the effect of domestic outsourcing on labor markets using Brazil's unexpected legalization of outsourcing in 1993, which sharply increased outsourcing among security guards. We show that outsourcing legalization led to a wave of occupational layoffs. Incumbent security guards affected by the layoffs moved to lower-wage firms and experienced persistent wage reductions. However, outsourcing legalization also had positive market-level effects, as revealed by a triple-difference specification that uses regional variation in the pre-legalization permissiveness of labor courts and compares security guards with less impacted occupations. Jobs were reallocated from older to younger workers. Total employment of security guards rose by 8-15% and their average wages increased by 2-4%. Interpreted through an economic framework, the results imply that outsourcing legalization benefitted entrant workers and generated lasting efficiency gains. If laid-off incumbent workers were fully compensated for their earnings losses, social breakeven would be achieved in one to five years.
Twitter thread
Last Updated: February 2022
Abstract (click to expand): I analyze how digital currency issuance by a private online platform affected the volume of trade in a large barter community in Toronto. The community initially banned cash, but subsequently introduced a digital token that could be transferred among users and redeemed at designated local stores for retail goods. Using comprehensive transactions data, I show that a large monetary expansion persistently increased transaction volume by 70% by enabling monetized trade. However, when token redemption was suddenly halted at a subset of stores, a run on the token ensued and transaction volume fell. The findings are consistent with a search-theoretic model wherein money functions as a medium of exchange.
Twitter thread
Presentation Video (September 2022)
Last Updated: June 2022
Under review
Abstract (click to expand): Many governments sell public housing to sitting tenants but limit the resale and leasing of sold units. What is the impact of this partial privatization? I present quasi-experimental evidence that fifteen years after its introduction, Hong Kong’s Tenants Purchase Scheme reduced household sizes in treated estates by 7 percent and increased household incomes by 23 percent. There was little reallocation of housing across households, however. These effects are instead driven by the relaxation of household-size-contingent income limits and unit allocation rules, which increased labor supply and altered household composition.
(with Matthew Gentzkow and Allen T. Zhang)
Last Updated: August 2021
Revise and resubmit, AEJ: Micro
Abstract (click to expand): We study the role of endogenous trust in amplifying ideological bias. Agents in our model seek to learn a sequence of states using information from sources whose accuracy is ex ante uncertain. Agents rely on noisy feedback about the state from direct experience to learn the accuracy of sources. Small biases in this feedback can cause large ideological differences in the agents’ trust in information sources and their beliefs about the states, and may lead agents to become overconfident in their own judgment. Disagreements can be similar in magnitude whether agents see only ideologically aligned sources or see a diverse range of sources.
Publications
Work in Progress
Outsourcing, Specialization, and Relational Contracts
(with Duoxi Li)
Commodity Money in a Barter Economy
(with Baiyun Jing)
Teaching
Upcoming: Instructor for HKU’s PMGM7004 (Global Management from Economics Perspectives) and PMGM7019 (Economics of Strategy and Organization).
Previous: TA for MIT’s Intro Micro (undergrad, 2022), Intermediate Micro (undergrad, 2018-20), Applied Econ for Managers (EMBA, 2019), Org Econ (PhD, 2018), and Industrial Organization II (PhD, 2022).
Notes
Things I learned in Grad School (the Hard Way)
Other Writing
What Caused Hong Kong’s Housing Crisis?
(Hong Kong Economic Policy Green Paper, 2022-9-23, Twitter thread)
香港房屋危機之謎 (香港經濟政策綠皮書, 2022-9-23)
In Hong Kong’s Olympic glory, a glimpse of a hopeful new future (SCMP, 2021-8-4)
Liberal or conservative, Hongkongers must learn to listen to those they disagree with (SCMP, 2019-9-7, with Spike Lee and Josephine Au)
預算案500億推創科 怎用得其所 (香港經濟日報, 2018-3-18)
社會面對新挑戰 須3方面調整 (香港經濟日報, 2017-9-13)
