Bio
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at the Graduate School of Economics, Finance and Management (GSEFM), Goethe University Frankfurt.
My research interests are empirical labor economics, labor and corporate finance, and wage inequality.
Curriculum Vitae (Updated April 2024)
Email: liang.ying@stud.uni-frankfurt.de
Working Papers
(with Mario Bossler and Thorsten Schank)
Current Version: May 2024
Revise and Resubmit, Journal of Public Economics
Abstract (click to expand): In 2015, Germany introduced a national minimum wage. While the literature agrees on at most limited negative effects on the overall employment level, we go into detail and analyze the impact on the working hours dimension and on the subset of minijobs. Using data from the German Structure of Earnings Survey in 2010, 2014, and 2018, we find empirical evidence that the minimum wage significantly reduces inequality in hourly and monthly wages. While various theoretical mechanisms suggest a reduction in working hours, these remain unchanged on average. However, minijobbers experience a notable reduction in working hours which can be linked to the specific institutional framework. Regarding employment, the results show no effects for regular jobs, but there is a noteworthy decline in minijobs, driven by transitions to regular employment and non-employment. The transitions in non-employment imply a wage elasticity of employment of -0.1 for minijobs. Our findings highlight that the institutional setting leads to heterogeneous effects of the minimum wage.
Current Version: August 2024
Working paper
Abstract (click to expand): This paper evaluates the impact of the German minimum wage policy on firms’ financial leverage. By using a comprehensive firm-establishment-employee linked dataset and a differencein-differences estimation with firm-level variation in treatment intensity, the analysis shows that the average minimum wage level reduces firms’ financial leverage by about 0.5 to 0.9 percentage points, corresponding to 1 to 2 percent of the mean of financial leverage. Further investigation of the mechanism shows that the minimum wage does not lead to significant capitallabor substitution; therefore, the labor share increases. Firms react to the increased labor share by deleveraging. The results suggest that while the minimum wage benefits workers by allocating more earnings to the labor force, it also introduces greater operating risks and encourages conservative financial behavior among firms.
Work in Progress
Minimum wage effect on within- and across-firm inequality
