MICHAEL B. WONG OFFICE CONTACT INFORMATION HOME CONTACT INFORMATION MIT Department of Economics 70 Josephine Avenue, Apt 1 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E52-301 Somerville, MA 02144 Cambridge, MA 02139 Mobile: 857-389-9303 [email protected] http://economics.mit.edu/grad/mbwong MIT PLACEMENT OFFICER MIT PLACEMENT ADMINISTRATOR Professor Ricardo Caballero Ms. Julia Martyn-Shah [email protected] [email protected] 617-253-0489 617-253-8787 DOCTORAL Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) STUDIES PhD, Economics, Expected completion June 2022 DISSERTATION: “Essays on Domestic Outsourcing” DISSERTATION COMMITTEE AND REFERENCES Professor David Autor Professor John Van Reenen MIT Department of Economics LSE Department of Economics 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E52-438 Houghton Street, Room 32L.2.27A Cambridge, MA 02139 London, WC2A 2AE, UK 617-258-7698 +44 (0) 20 7955 6856 [email protected] [email protected] Professor Robert Townsend Professor Robert Gibbons MIT Department of Economics MIT Sloan School of Management 77 Massachusetts Avenue, E52-538 100 Main Street, E62-519 Cambridge, MA 02139 Cambridge, MA 02142-1347 617-452-3722 617-253-0283 [email protected] [email protected] PRIOR Harvard University 2012 EDUCATION A.b, Magna Cum Laude with Highest Distinction in Physics Minor in Computer Science CITIZENSHIP USA LANGUAGES Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese FIELDS Primary Fields: Labor Economics; Organizational Economics Secondary Field: Monetary Economics TEACHING Intermediate Microeconomic Theory (MIT 14.04, undergrad) 2018-20 EXPERIENCE Teaching Assistant to Prof. Robert Townsend Applied Economics for Managers (MIT 15.722, exec MbA), 2019 Teaching Assistant to Prof. Robert Gibbons MICHAEL WONG 25 SEPTEMBER 2021-- PAGE 2 Organizational Economics (MIT 14.282, graduate), 2018 Teaching Assistant to Prof. Robert Gibbons Introduction to Computer Science II (Harvard CS51, undergrad) 2011-12 Teaching Assistant to Prof. Greg Morrisett RELEVANT MIT Department of Economics, Research Assistant to Prof. 2016 POSITIONS David Autor and Parag Pathak University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Full-time 2013-15 Research Assistant to Prof. Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, Part-time Research Assistant to Prof. Eric Budish Applied Predictive Technologies, Business Consultant 2012-13 FELLOWSHIPS, George and Obie Shultz Fund at MIT 2019 HONORS, AND NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program 2015 AWARDS John Harvard Scholarship 2009 Detur book prize 2009 PROFESSIONAL Referee for: Journal of Economic Theory ACTIVITIES RESEARCH “Labor Market Consequences of Domestic Outsourcing: Evidence from PAPERS Legalization in Brazil” [Job Market Paper] (with Mayara Felix) Abstract: Domestic outsourcing has been shown to reduce wages at the firm level, but evidence on its market-level effects is needed to evaluate its welfare consequences. We leverage Brazil's unexpected legalization of outsourcing in 1993 to quantify how domestic outsourcing impacts workers and labor markets. We focus on security guards, the only major occupation to experience a large increase in outsourcing. First, we show that a wave of occupational layoffs ensued. Incumbent security guards affected by these layoffs became displaced from their jobs, moved to lower-wage firms, and saw persistent wage reductions. In present-value terms, they lost 1.2 years of pre-outsourcing earnings. Second, we measure the market-level effects of outsourcing legalization using a triple-difference specification that exploits regional variation in pre-legalization permissiveness of labor courts and compares security guards with less impacted occupations. We find that outsourcing legalization reallocated jobs from older to younger workers, increased total employment of guards by 8%, and raised their average wages by 2%. Interpreted through an economic framework, these estimates imply that outsourcing legalization generated substantial efficiency gains. If laid- off incumbent workers were fully compensated for their earnings losses, social breakeven would be achieved in one to five years. “The Power of Money: Lessons from Introducing Digital Currency to Barter Community” This paper investigates how digital currency issuance by a private online platform affected the physical exchange of used goods in a large North American barter community using comprehensive transactions data. Since the community forbade the use of cash, users initially relied on beer, gift MICHAEL WONG 25 SEPTEMBER 2021-- PAGE 3 cards, and transit tokens to complete transactions. To reduce transaction costs, the community introduced an app-based transferable digital token that could be redeemed at designated local stores for retail goods. Token supply was then quintupled through helicopter drops to users. This increase in token issuance led completed transactions to persistently rise by 70%. However, when token redemption was suddenly halted at a subset of stores, a run on the token ensued and transaction volume fell. “Ideological Bias and Trust in Information Sources” (with Matthew Gentzkow and Allen T. Zhang) We study the role of endogenous trust in amplifying ideological bias. Agents in our model seek to learn a sequence of states using information from sources whose accuracy is ex ante uncertain. Agents rely on noisy feedback about the state from direct experience to learn the accuracy of sources. Small biases in this feedback can cause large ideological differences in the agents’ trust in information sources and their beliefs about the states, and may lead agents to become overconfident in their own judgment. Disagreements can be similar in magnitude whether agents see only ideologically aligned sources or see a diverse range of sources. RESEARCH IN “The Careers of Outsourced Workers in Brazil” (with Duoxi Li) PROGRESS Recent literature examines the wages of outsourced workers, but the careers of outsourced workers have received almost no research attention. This study uses brazil's comprehensive administrative data to estimate the effects of contract-firm employment on the careers and wages of workers. We focus on security guards and cleaners, two service occupations for which contract firms are easily identifiable from industry codes. We find that contract-firm employment is associated with weakened long-term commitment, reduced internal development and promotion, and less rent sharing, with overall negative effects on the job security and career advancement of workers. The rent-reducing effects of outsourcing are substantially larger for the unlicensed occupation of cleaners than for the higher-wage occupation of security guards. “Domestic Outsourcing and Firm Performance: Evidence from Brazil” (with Beatriz Pousada) This project quantifies how domestic outsourcing affects firm performance by combining brazil’s comprehensive employment data with firm surveys. We leverage several sources of exogenous variation, such as Brazil’s 1993 and 2017 outsourcing legalizations, as well as outsourcing events identified from employment histories, to estimate the effects of outsourcing on firm productivity, profitability, and internal organization. “Public Housing for Sale: Impact of the Tenant Purchase Scheme in Hong Kong” This paper estimates the impact of Hong Kong’s Tenant Purchase Scheme (TPS), which allowed 183,700 households to buy partial ownership rights to their public rental units. To identify the program’s effects, I leverage its MICHAEL WONG 25 SEPTEMBER 2021-- PAGE 4 staggered rollout across housing estates in a difference-in-differences design. I argue that TPS did not meaningfully reallocate housing across households due to restrictions on leasing and resale. However, total population and average household size fell in treated estates, while average household income rose. The reason is that TPS removed household-size-contingent unit allocation rules and means testing requirements, thus inducing some residents to move out. Relaunching TPS may therefore exacerbate Hong Kong's current housing shortage. .