About Me
Welcome! I am a PhD candidate in Economics at Duke University.
My research interests are labor, macro, and spatial economics. I am interested in how family background, immigration policies, and labor market frictions shape inequality and distort the allocation of talent.
My CV is available here. You can contact me at runling.wu@duke.edu.
Working Papers
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Intergenerational Mobility in Welfare: Wages and Amenities
December 2025·Working Paper
Measures of intergenerational mobility primarily focus on earnings and often overlook substantial heterogeneity in job amenities. We propose a novel measure of intergenerational welfare mobility, “value-value” slope, including both pecuniary and non-pecuniary value of a job. We apply a revealed preference approach to construct common rankings of jobs based on worker flows. Using Danish administrative data, we document that there is 31% more intergenerational mobility than earnings-based mobility measures alone would suggest: the value-value slope is 0.105 and the wage-premia slope is 0.151.
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The Worker and Firm Origins of Life-Cycle Wage Inequality
May 2026·Working Paper
Wage inequality widens substantially over the life cycle. We decompose this widening into worker and firm heterogeneity in returns to experience and dynamic sorting. We extend the AKM model to allow wage growth to differ across workers and firms, and develop a two-way clustering algorithm. Using matched employer-employee data from Italy, we document substantial heterogeneity in both worker and firm growth components. Worker growth accounts for two-thirds of the rise in life-cycle wage inequality, while firm growth accounts for the remaining third. Workers with more accumulated skills increasingly sort into high-paying firms over the life cycle.
“The Micro and Macro Perspective of the Labor Market” Reading Group
Jesse Wedewer and I co-organize the “Micro and Macro Perspective of the Labor Market” Virtual Reading Group at Duke. An archive can be found here.
Please contact labor.public@gmail.com if you are interested in participating. Meetings are on Saturdays at 11 AM (ET) via Zoom.
Teaching
Teaching Assistant, Department of Economics, Duke University:
- Econ 702 — Macroeconomics I (PhD), Fall 2024
- Econ 706 — Macroeconomics II (PhD), Spring 2025
Contact
Email: runling.wu@duke.edu
Department of Economics, Duke University • Durham, NC