Shaoda Wang

Biographic Data

ID5729493
NAMEShaoda Wang
GIVEN NAMESShaoda
FAMILY NAMEWang
SIGNATUREWANG S
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Chicago
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS7
TOTAL CITATIONS15
WORKS AS AUTHOR7
WORKS AS EDITOR0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2020
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX1

  • Court Capture, Local Protectionism, and Economic Integration

    Ernest Liu, Yi Lü et al.ARTICLEThe Review of Economics and…2026

    Court capture in developing countries is pervasive, yet its economic effects remain underexplored. We study a Chinese reform that transferred financial and personnel authority over local courts from local to provincial governments. Exploiting the staggered roll-out, we find a 7.3% decline in local defendants’ win rates against non-local plaintiffs, alongside improved judicial quality. The reform encouraged smaller non-local firms to litigate and …

  • Policy Experimentation in China

    Shaoda Wang, David Y YangARTICLEJournal of Political Economy2025Cited by: 13References: 8

  • Courting a Blue Sky? Understanding the Constrained Judicialization of Environmental Governance in China

    Zhuang Liu, Wenwei Peng et al.ARTICLEJournal of Contemporary China2024

    This paper studies the constrained judicialization of environmental governance in China. It starts by quantitatively describing the judicialization of environmental protection in China over the past decade, including both its progresses and the suppressions that it faced, and shows that environmental courts have had virtually no tangible impact on reducing pollution levels. It then attempts to rationalize the observed patterns by answering two qu…

  • English language requirement and educational inequality

    Open AccessHongbin Li, Lingsheng Meng et al.ARTICLEJournal of Development Economics2024Cited by: 1References: 3

    This paper studies the unintended effect of English language requirement on educational inequality by investigating how the staggered rollout of English listening tests in China’s high-stakes National College Entrance Exam (NCEE) affected the rural–urban gap in college access. Leveraging administrative data covering the universe of NCEE participants between 1999 and 2003, we find that the introduction of English listening tests significantly lowe…

  • Buddha's grace illuminates all

    Open AccessShaoda Wang, Boxiao ZhangARTICLEEconomica2023Cited by: 1References: 35

    This paper studies how modern human capital emerged in early 20th century China. We document a novel historical episode known as the ‘Temple Destruction Movement’ (TDM), in which Chinese local governments appropriated huge amounts of Buddhist and Taoist temple assets to support the modernization of local schooling. We find that before the TDM, the initial stock of temple assets was uncorrelated with the levels and trends of human capital developm…

  • When Information Conflicts with Obligations

    Open AccessAo Wang, Shaoda Wang et al.ARTICLEThe Economic Journal2023References: 30

    We experimentally test how psychological motivations can impact the processing of purely objective information. We first document that, when the high-stakes College Entrance Exam is held in the month of Ramadan, Chinese Muslim students perform significantly worse. When asked about the impact of fasting, they severely underestimate the cost of taking the exam during Ramadan, even when presented with direct empirical evidence. In the experiment, we…

  • Watering Down Environmental Regulation in China

    Open AccessGuojun He, Shaoda Wang et al.ARTICLEThe Quarterly Journal of Economics2020

    This article estimates the effect of environmental regulation on firm productivity using a spatial regression discontinuity design implicit in China's water quality monitoring system. Because water quality readings are important for political evaluations and the monitoring stations only capture emissions from their upstream regions, local government officials are incentivized to enforce tighter environmental standards on firms immediately upstrea…