Yajie Wang

When can trade openness strengthen rather than erode fiscal capacity? I argue that openness builds central fiscal capacity when export opportunities create new firms under the jurisdiction of a centrally controlled tax bureaucracy, limiting local influence over enforcement. China’s World Trade Organization (WTO) accession provides a most-likely test: the 2002 enterprise income tax (EIT) reform placed new firms under central collection and gave the center a statutory revenue share. Using a city-level Bartik design that instruments export exposure with tariff-predicted export growth, I find that exposed cities registered more private firms, had more frontline tax bureaucrats in the central tax bureaucracy, and collected more centrally shared EIT. I also show that fiscal centralization enables selective compensation downstream: national revenue pooling leads to greater grants and fiscal dependence in cities where employment in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) declined more. These findings suggest that the fiscal effects of openness depend on how governments organize collection and pool revenue across places.

Trade agreements commit governments to lower tariffs, but often leave discretion over how those reductions are allocated across products. This paper explains how administrative hierarchy shapes the product-level allocation of trade liberalization. I develop a theory of administrative representation: firms with authoritative bureaucratic sponsors are better positioned to turn product-specific demands into actionable requests for tariff relief. I examine China’s trade policymaking after its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) by linking firms’ pre-accession imports to subsequent tariff schedules and interim-duty lists and identifying each firm’s administrative affiliation status. Products with greater pre-accession import exposure to centrally affiliated firms faced lower applied tariff rates after WTO accession and were more likely to receive preferential interim-duty rates. Institutional records and policymaker interviews describe the proposed transmission process. Together, the distributional and process evidence is consistent with domestic administrative institutions shaping the product-level allocation of trade liberalization.

High-skilled immigration is often treated as the least contested form of immigration. Yet this consensus may erode when elite rhetoric links foreign STEM workers to geopolitical rivalry and national-security risk. We argue that great-power competition affects immigration opinion on two distinct margins: the policy-scale margin, or support for expanding high-skilled admissions, and the applicant-selection margin, or preferences over which applicants should be admitted. We test this argument using parallel vignette and conjoint survey experiments in the United States and China (combined N > 6,000). The vignette experiment shows that threat framing lowers support for expanding high-skilled visa programs in both countries, while a competition-with-screening frame partially mitigates this decline by portraying foreign talent as a controllable strategic asset. The perceived channels differ across contexts: U.S. respondents react most strongly through national-security and technological-advantage concerns, whereas Chinese respondents react more through economic and labor-market concerns. The conjoint experiment shows that applicant selection is more stable. Across countries and framing conditions, respondents favor applicants with stronger host-country ties, higher expected income, and more favorable geopolitical alignment. These findings show that geopolitical rivalry does not simply close the door to skilled migration. Instead, it produces selective openness: citizens become more skeptical of expanding admissions overall while continuing to favor applicants who appear economically valuable, geopolitically aligned, and socially attached to the host country.

How do firms respond when a government takes a position on a geopolitical issue but leaves its enforcement resolve uncertain? We argue that political standing shapes how firms respond to this uncertainty. Firms with stronger political standing have better information about the state’s enforcement intentions and can calibrate their response, whereas firms with weaker standing are more likely to withdraw beyond formal requirements. We test this argument using Chinese customs data around North Korea’s 2006 nuclear test and UN Security Council Resolution 1718. Difference-in-differences estimates show that private firms sharply reduced exports to North Korea, while state-owned enterprises largely maintained trade. This divergence extends to products outside the resolution’s likely scope, including food and other humanitarian goods. The findings suggest that ambiguous state signals produce uneven patterns of overcompliance across firms, broadening the economic and humanitarian consequences of targeted geopolitical policies.