Work in Progress

"Inside the Black Box of College Admissions: How Universities Screen and Why Variation Matters," with Ruo-Fan Liu.

–Extended abstract accepted by and will be presented at 2023 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA. 

–Extended abstract accepted by and will be presented at 2023 RC28 Summer Meeting, Ann Arbor, MI.

–Extended abstract invited for presentation at 2023 Research on East Asian Demography and Inequality (READI) Seminar, Princeton, NJ.

"Gatekeeping is an important function in establishing social closure. Existing research typically chooses one or two organizations to examine how universities gatekeep. But little is known about how different universities apply types of merits to delimit applicant pools. This study draws on Taiwan admissions data, a unique administrative dataset consisting of criteria from all 69 fourth-year universities to examine school variation in university gatekeeping. We suggest “stratifying meritocracy”– a notion that refers to how organizations rank and order different types of merits (standardized test and non-standard performance) through a hierarchical order to establish social closure. In particular, top-tier universities reward standardized tests and non-standard performance evenly, whereas mid- and bottom-tier universities reward types of merits unevenly, either prioritizing test scores or interviews over others. We found that such a process is not a one-time procedure but a multi-stage selection. These findings shed light on discussions of meritocracy, organizational strategies, and stratification in higher education."

"A Network Approach to Academic Inclination and Placement"

–Presented at 2023 Economics UGRD Research Showcase, University of Wisconsin–Madison, WI.

–Directed Study proposal supervised by Assistant Professor Matteo Camboni.

"The Econ Job Market is a miniature of the general labor market. The variation and randomness in placements of Econ Job Market Candidates (JMC) highlight the essence of strategic interactions and matching between the prospective scholars and hiring departments. To step back, within the same program, a JMC first encounters the dilemma of pursuing academic positions or industry jobs when ex-ante knowing to conflict with the “stars” in the exact same research subfields. Adopting structures in monitoring mechanism design and network models, this study focuses on unveiling the black box of candidate–candidate peer effects and collective reputation spillovers influencing academic inclination and placement. With a network approach with incentive schemes in terms of reputation, this study aims to contribute to Microeconomic Theory literature with a highly-relevant focus group and extend to frictions of general labor market matching."