【Trade/Empirical Seminar】Field Choice, Skill Specificity, and Labor Market Disruptions
2026/05/05
研討會日期 : 2026-05-05
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Lin Tian
地點 : Conference Room B110
主持人 : Professor Wen-Tai Hsu
演講者簡介 : Dr. Lin Tian received her Ph.D. in Economics from Columbia University in 2018. She is currently an Assistant Professor at INSEAD. Her research interests are International Trade, Economic Geography, Urban Economics, Public Finance, and Development Economics.
演講摘要 : We argue that college students' field-of-study choices significantly influence how economies respond to labor market disruptions. To do so, we develop and estimate a framework featuring forward-looking students who choose a field of study when entering college, and subsequently make decisions over occupations after graduating and entering the labor market. Different fields endow workers with distinct comparative advantages and varying costs associated with switching occupations. Simulating both a trade war and wide scale adoption of AI, we use our model to make three points. First, relative to models that ignore how new cohorts adjust their field-of-study choices, our framework predicts larger aggregate income responses and greater distributional differences. Second, policies that enhance flexibility in field-of-study decisions---such as relaxing capacity constraints in high-demand programs---raise aggregate output. Finally, these policies also lessen the adverse distributional consequences of shocks, by affording more opportunities to students with lower earnings potential.
