Haoyang (Stan) Xie <br>谢昊洋

Haoyang (Stan) Xie
谢昊洋

PhD student at UChicago Econ

Hello! I am Haoyang (Stan) Xie. I am a second-year PhD student at Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics at The University of Chicago. Prior to this, I was a Research Professional at Becker Friedman Institute. I received my M.A. from The University of Chicago, and B.A. from Peking University.

My research focuses on development, political economy, and behavioral economics. My research relies on our amazing research partner Marakuja Kivu Research.

Research

Publications

Working Papers

  • The Moral Economy of Supervisor Kickbacks And Its Significance for Corruption (with Raul Sanchez de la Sierra, Kristof Titeca, Aimable A. Lameke and Albert Malukisa Nkuku)

  • Measuring State Weakness: Inferring Underlying Legal State Capacity from Buyer Choices (with Raul Sanchez de la Sierra and Yuting Chen)

Work in Progress

  • Foreign Hands in Ethiopia

Research Highlights

Agents Pulled Over Drivers, Often Using Brute Force

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A large share of unofficial police income is generated through a “quota scheme:” managers at police stations ask agents posted at street intersections to escort drivers to the stations, where the managers extract a bribe from the drivers. Experimentally decreasing the quota worsens the agency’s ability to to manage traffic, while not improving its ability to enforce the traffic code.

Kickbacks Motivated by Distributional Concerns

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We conduct a within-individual randomized cash transfer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s traffic police agency to analyze supervisor kickbacks. We present the first evidence of side payments from state officials to their supervisors and suggest that supervisor/agent collusion in the state can destroy the benefits of traditional anti-corruption policies.

Decay of State Capacity over Distance

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Motivated by Sanchez de la Sierra (2021), I structurally quantify one measure of state capacity and applies it to characterize how state capacity varies over space. Each kilometer away from a state office decreases state capacity by 5%. My findings represent an augmented attempt to quantify legal capacity as defined in theoretical literature, and use that to show that state weakness is heterogeneous over space.