Publications

How Does Quality Culture Help Successfully Implement Lean Projects in the Age of Artificial Intelligence? A Moderated Mediation Model

Xuanyu Cai, Kunyu Yang, Yunfan Zhang

China Quality (中国质量)

A moderated mediation model examining how quality culture and AI usage jointly drive lean project success through strategic feedback and learning.

Apathy in the Heatwave: How Climate Shocks Exacerbating Emotional Violence

Xiangxu Chang, Xuanyu Cai, Wenli Xu

Revise & Resubmit at Climate Risk Management

Cross-country evidence that climate shocks (extreme temperatures, droughts, floods, storms) significantly increase intimate partner emotional violence, operating through household isolation, male jealousy, and controlling behavior pathways.

diddesign: Double DID Estimation with Multiple Pre-Treatment Periods in Stata

Xuanyu Cai, Wenli Xu

Under Review at The Stata Journal

A Stata implementation of the double difference-in-differences framework of Egami and Yamauchi (2023) for settings with multiple pre-treatment periods, optimally combining standard and sequential DID moments via GMM, with parallel-trends equivalence testing and multi-core parallel bootstrap inference.

Carrier Status, Cousin Offers, and Observability in Marriage-Market Search

Xuanyu Cai, Mingyu Shu, Fengming Liu

Under Review

How does a positive carrier-screening result change the choice between a confirmed first-cousin offer and unrelated marriage-market search? We depict this choice as a model in which a healthy adult who knows her genotype can surrender a kin offer for a costly search attempt. We derive conditions under which private carrier status raises the reservation cost of leaving the kin option, candidate observability reverses that ordering, and early and late disclosure differ. When candidates infer type from the absence of a signal, disclosure combines rejection with improved beliefs, so its effect on carrier search is ambiguous. We show that the ordering and the monotone disclosure response survive repeated search without recall.

Optimal Block Time with Staking Commitment

Xuanyu Cai, Mingyu Shu, Shun Wang

Under Review

How do protocol rules create commitment in a market where tokens pay no cash flows? We study a Stackelberg game where a staker locks tokens for integer blocks and commits to a deterministic liquidation schedule and a trader reacts to diffusion and jump news under block-dependent execution costs. The trader's unique affine best response makes the staker's schedule the metric projection of a fuel-only benchmark onto a cumulative-sales obstacle, yielding constraint losses and a test of whether the lock-up binds. At a fixed reward rate, every payoff-maximizing block time is strictly interior above a computable threshold. Higher rewards weakly lengthen commitment, while greater belief volatility weakly shortens the optimal block time. Protocol speed and credible commitment are one design problem.

Transparency, Species Visibility, and the Allocation of Biodiversity Conservation

Xuanyu Cai, Mingyu Shu, Mingda Wang

Under Review · Biodiversity Economics

Why do conservation budgets favor visible species? We study a conservation official allocating a fixed budget between a charismatic and an obscure species. The public observes a transparent report and updates its belief about the official's stewardship quality. The official values public recognition. Her posterior reputation enters utility directly. A unique equilibrium emerges. Transparency shifts protection toward the charismatic species. It also unlocks future funding. Biodiversity first rises and then falls with transparency. A minimum standard for the obscure species restores balance. So does a salience-neutral audit. Our results inform the design of conservation funding policy.

Confidence under Audit: When Does Verification Help?

Xuanyu Cai, Mingyu Shu, Fengming Liu

Under Review · Political Economy

This paper examines whether the effectiveness of a leader's public confidence signal is influenced by the chance of an external audit. We find that verification improves the signal when audits deter imitation by weak leaders without removing strong leaders' incentive to commit. Otherwise, its impact is limited. Too little auditing invites imitation, and too much auditing silences every leader, so attainable information drops sharply.

lwdid: A Python Package for Lee–Wooldridge Difference-in-Differences Estimation with Small Samples

Xuanyu Cai, Wenli Xu

SSRN Preprint

A unified Python implementation of the Lee–Wooldridge rolling-transformation approach to DiD, enabling exact small-sample inference for both common timing and staggered adoption designs.

Constitutional Choice before Residence

Xuanyu Cai, Mingyu Shu, Mingda Wang

Submitted · Political Economy

How should legal standards be set when the choice changes who lives where? We depict constitutional choice as a referendum held before residence, in which expected standards sort citizens and resident medians set the policy that follows. Voters anticipate the continuation, so identical fundamentals can retain the national code or devolve authority. We derive conditions under which majority rule departs from welfare, and under which a federal band uniquely implements integration but never positive diversity. Moving costs separate politics from welfare: low costs cause excessive divergence, intermediate costs block beneficial diversity, and high costs align both criteria at integration. We motivate the analysis with federal systems in which central rules limit local standards.

Vaccination and the Evolution of Genetic Susceptibility

Mingyu Shu, Mingda Wang, Xuanyu Cai

Working Paper

We build a model of epidemic control with genetic selection. A planner chooses vaccine coverage; infection lowers fertility only among 𝑎𝑎 homozygotes, and vaccination shields the susceptibility allele from selection. Higher coverage raises the allele frequency inherited by the next cohort; the frequency is set by the epidemic and mutation. We show the trade-off between infection today and invasion tomorrow, and the balance depends on vaccine efficacy. Optimal policy may trade current protection against inherited susceptibility; then the social value of vaccination is negative. Optimal coverage is fine-tuned to balance protection today and invasion tomorrow.

How Does Climate Political Pressure Affect Corporate Decarbonization? Evidence from China's ``Message Board for Leaders'

Wenli Xu, Xuanyu Cai^†, Xiangxu Chang

Working Paper · Political Economy

Micro-level causal evidence that institutionalized citizen participation through China's official digital platform drives corporate decarbonization via policy enforcement, green innovation, and substantive CSR practices.

Political Incentives and Ecological Tipping Points

Xuanyu Cai, Mingyu Shu

Work in Progress · Political Economy

Silent Scandals: Polarization, Attention, and Accountability

Xuanyu Cai, Mingyu Shu, Zichen Wang

Work in Progress · Political Economy