Duke University campus with cherry blossoms

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

  • Intergenerational Mobility in Welfare: Wages and Amenities (with Natalia Khorunzhina and Jesse Wedewer)
    Abstract (click to expand)

    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.

  • The Worker and Firm Origins of Life-Cycle Wage Inequality (coming soon) (with Xincheng Qiu and Jesse Wedewer)

“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