About Me

I am a sixth-year Ph.D. student in the Economics Department at Cornell University. I am on the 2026–2027 academic job market. I work on macroeconomics, environmental economics and firm dynamics. I obtained a BA in Economics from Cornell in 2021.

My research focuses on three areas: (1) firm dynamics with endogenous technology and overlooked dimensions of firm heterogeneity; (2) the micro and macro impact of climate change and emissions regulation; and (3) empirical and computational methods for heterogeneous-agent and spatial economics. I use micro data to answer macroeconomic questions.

My full CV can be found here. You can contact me at zx88@cornell.edu.

Working Papers

Endogenous Returns to Scale

with Alexandr Kopytov and Mathieu Taschereau-Dumouchel

(Paper) (Slides)

The Origin of Risk

with Alexandr Kopytov and Mathieu Taschereau-Dumouchel

Accepted at Quarterly Journal of Economics

(Paper) (Slides)

The (Mis)Allocation Channel of Climate Change: Evidence from Global Firm-level Microdata

with Tianzi Liu

(Paper) (STEG Slides)

The Distributional and Aggregate Effects of Factor-biased Climate Change

with Tianzi Liu and Ivan Rudik

(Paper)

Space-time Jacobian: A Spectral Approach to Dynamic Economic Geography

Misallocation with Capital Heterogeneity

with Yu Wang

(Paper)

Publications and Forthcoming Articles

Climate Change and Long-Run Factor Shares

with Tianzi Liu and Ivan Rudik

AEA Papers and Proceedings, vol. 116, May 2026, pp. 510–516.

(Paper)

Works in Progress (in presentation mode)

How Emissions Scale: Theory and Evidence

with Tianzi Liu