科学研究

Shiqi Guo is an Assistant Professor at the Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received a Ph.D. in Development Economics from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), Geneva, Switzerland. He was a visiting fellow in the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard University during 2019-2020 and a visiting Ph.D. fellow at United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) in 2017. His research spans the fields of Development Economics, Behavioral Economics, Political Economy, and Environmental Economics. His work has been published in journals including Journal of Development Economics, Games and Economic Behavior, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and Journal of Comparative Economics.

We study the impact of Chinese infrastructure aid on local employment using household surveys from ten African countries during 2000–14. Our main identification strategy exploits the variation in proximities between aid projects and survey locations, and the random timings of project construction relative to the survey date. Using an approach similar to difference-in-differences, we show that Chinese aid increases the probability of local employment by two percentage points within its close proximity, compared to areas near a not-yet-implemented project, relative to places that never have aid projects. Increase in employment starts immediately with project implementation and persists after project completion. The longer-term impact is driven by migration and employment of skilled labor. We also find evidence for cross-sector and spatial spillover effects. Our results persist when we use alternative datasets on employment and different empirical strategies, and when we account for the potential impact of other local development resources.