Yaotian (Justin) Zhang
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
I am a PhD student in Economics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, working in labor economics and the economics of education. My research studies how people respond to failure in high-stakes competitions: how they interpret a disappointing result, whether they try again, and how admission policies shape these choices for disadvantaged students. Current projects use administrative records from China’s college entrance examination, combining quasi-experimental designs with structural models of learning about ability and the decision to retake.
Fields: Labor Economics · Economics of Education · Public Economics
Research
This paper provides evidence that legalizing a prohibited good shifts enforcement costs onto neighboring jurisdictions that continue to prohibit it. Illinois opened an adult-use cannabis market in January 2020 while Iowa retained prohibition, creating a discontinuity in legal regimes along a shared river border. Using incident-based crime records for all Iowa counties, I compare counties connected to Illinois by a highway bridge with counties in the state’s interior. Bridge counties recorded more drug offenses after the market opened, and their trends show no divergence beforehand. The larger response appears in property offenses, a category the legalizing statute does not govern, and it attenuates with distance from the Illinois population. Violent offenses move in the same direction but are imprecisely estimated. The industrial composition of the border counties offers a competing explanation for the property result, so its mechanism remains an open question. Revenue accounting confined within state lines is therefore likely to understate the cost of a decision to legalize.