Zejin Shi

I am an Assistant Professor at Wuhan University. I am a labor economist and macroeconomist studying life-cycle decisions, including education, marriage, labor supply, retirement, and fertility. I use structural models and counterfactual analysis for policy evaluation.

Fields: labor economics, macroeconomics, econometrics, computational economics.

Research

Working Papers

Social Security Depletion: Worker Responses, Bailout Financing, and Policy Timing

with Thomas J. Sargent

Understanding the Evolution of Labor and Marriage Markets from 1968 to 2018

Working paper

Restoring Pension Sustainability in the Near and Long Term: Delayed Retirement or More Births?

with Pengwei Guo and Jun Nie

Abstract

We study how delayed retirement and higher fertility can improve pension sustainability in the near and long term. We provide a unified heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations framework to study general-equilibrium transitions under these policies and compare their effects on fiscal sustainability and welfare across cohorts. In an application to China, delayed retirement provides immediate fiscal relief but has a limited long-run effect. Higher fertility substantially reduces long-run pension deficits, but only after a lag of about two decades. Combining the two provides complementary relief, easing fiscal pressure on the pension system throughout the transition. We construct the fiscal value of birth as a break-even benchmark for governments to assess pro-natalist subsidies. Using China as an example, we find that raising the total fertility rate from 1.0 to 1.3–1.5 generates average present-value fiscal relief of approximately 125,000–132,000 yuan per additional birth.

Model-Aided Identification of Policy Effects Using RCTs

with Sebastian Galiani and Juan Pantano

Work in Progress

Connected Equilibrium Transitions with Sequential Shocks

Propagation through the Fundamental Surplus

with Lars Ljungqvist, Andrea Papetti, and Thomas J. Sargent

Publication

QuantEcon.py: A Community Based Python Library for Quantitative Economics

with Quentin Batista, et al. Journal of Open Source Software, 2023.