Minjie Ding

Uses Chinese household data and a HANK framework to study how housing, marriage, hukou, and education thresholds reshape consumption, saving, and monetary policy transmission.

• Estimates household MPC from CFPS data and finds a U-shaped pattern over income and assets rather than a monotonic decline
• Uses cross-city down-payment policy variation in DID and DDD designs to identify the consumption effects of tighter thresholds
• Builds a threshold HANK model in which near-threshold households save more aggressively, weakening immediate stimulus but making monetary and fiscal effects more persistent over time

Uses original survey data on food delivery riders to study how time preference (patience), liquidity stress, and marriage-related target saving jointly shape consumption behavior.

• Constructs core measures including discount factors, temporary MPC, persistent MPC, and daily MPC from questionnaires
• Finds that financial fragility raises MPC, but low-asset and impatient riders do not necessarily consume more
• Explains low spending among target savers through a dynamic model of marriage-related saving pressure and counterfactual relief

Examines how unexpected U.S. monetary tightening transmits into China’s existing-home market across cities, size bands, and price tiers.

• Combines Anjuke listing prices, Lianjia transactions, and smooth local projections on high-frequency U.S. surprises
• Finds larger price declines in bigger cities and in cities with deeper financial markets
• Finds that larger housing units experience faster price declines and faster sales

Studies why U.S. monetary policy shocks generate different interest-rate, industrial-production, and exchange-rate responses across countries.

• Uses country-level monthly VARs with high-frequency policy news shocks to estimate domestic impulse responses
• Links response heterogeneity to financial development, inequality, capital-account openness, exchange-rate regimes, and income levels
• Shows that financial structure and distribution shape both the magnitude of spillovers and the co-movement of rates and output

Places distribution costs inside the Balassa-Samuelson framework to explain both retail law-of-one-price deviations and unstable price-level transmission across provinces.

• Tests the Penn effect, the BS core channel, and inflation decomposition within one unified empirical framework
• Shows that distribution costs significantly explain tradable retail-price deviations across provinces
• Explains why relative productivity can move sectoral relative prices without stably passing through to the overall price level