Welcome to my website! I am Huilin Zhang, a Ph.D. candidate in economics at Purdue University. I am on the 2024-2025 job market. My research focuses on Urban Economics, Spatial Economics, International Trade and Applied Microeconomics. My current projects use structural models and reduced-form methods to explore topics related to the labor market, including (1) productivity externalities and optimal policies, (2) globalization and CEO compensation, and (3) student-university matching and human capital production.

Job Market Paper

“The Productivity Externality of Working from Home: Welfare and Policy Implications” [PDF]
I study how the socially optimal level of onsite work differs from the market equilibrium. I develop a general equilibrium model in which workers decide how much to work onsite and work from home. Productivity spillovers can occur within and between onsite and remote workers. The balance between onsite and remote productivity spillover effects affects the gap between the socially optimal and the market equilibrium level of onsite work. I measure these spillovers by matching the model to U.S. survey data from 2022 to 2024 at the city-sector-work mode level. I find that, on average, a social planner could improve welfare by 2% by increasing hybrid workers’ share of onsite time by 3% and increasing the number of fully onsite workers by 2%. This could be accomplished by offering a subsidy for onsite work equal to 11% of hybrid workers’ gross income. Without the remote productivity spillovers, a similar level of welfare improvement would require larger changes: hybrid workers’ share of onsite time would need to increase by 5%, and the number of fully onsite workers would need to increase by 3%. The subsidy would cost 15% of hybrid workers’ gross income.

Works in Progress

“How Globalization Changes the Level and Structure of Executive Compensation” （with David Hummels, and Jakob R. Munch）
We combine the principal-agent model with unobservable effort and the assignment model with heterogeneous ability. The board uses compensation to incentivize the CEO under trade shocks that are either interactive or exogenous to the CEO’s effort. CEO compensation consists of a fixed payment and a share of firm value. The increase in firm value from a positive interactive shock grows with greater CEO effort, while the change in firm value from an exogenous shock remains unchanged regardless of the CEO effort. The model predicts that globalization changes CEO compensation through scale, volatility, and magnification channels. Using Danish matched worker-firm data, we find empirical results supporting these channels: (1) Exporting and offshoring increase the level of CEO compensation by increasing firm size and value; (2) The share of firm value paid to CEOs increases with the volatility of interactive shocks induced by global markets but decreases with the volatility of exogenous shocks; and (3) Higher-ability CEOs generate greater sales increases under positive demand shocks, magnifying the effect of interactive shocks.

“The Production of Human Capital in A System of Universities” (with David Hummels)
We build a general equilibrium model to answer the following questions: (1) How do shocks—such as increasing manufacturing wages and technological changes—affect the number and quality of colleges and the distribution of human capital in society? (2) How do changes in borrowing costs affect intergenerational human capital formation? The model features matching between heterogeneous students and universities. Students receive higher human capital from a good match between their ability and university quality.