About the Speaker:
Prof. Yongheng Deng is the John P. Morgridge Distinguished Chair in Business and Chair of the Department of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics at the Wisconsin School of Business, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Previously, he held key academic and leadership roles at the National University of Singapore and the University of Southern California, and served as an economist at the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight in Washington, DC. Prof. Deng has chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Real Estate and was the first Asian President of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association. His research spans real estate finance, housing and urban economics, asset pricing, mortgage risk, climate change impacts on real estate, and policy analysis in China and Asia. His work is widely published in top journals and cited by major media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The New York Times.

Abstract:
We study how online teaching technology affects the educational gap between rich and poor children. By exploiting an exogenous switch from in-person to online teaching ordered by local governments in China’s Guangdong Province in 2020-2021, we propose a digital footprint approach based on smartphone usage to construct key variables that are otherwise hard to measure, including identifying families with children who graduate from primary school, the type of schools they go to, and family wealth status. Across the 21 cities in our sample, we find that the relative advantage of children from better-to-do families rises with the duration of online teaching. Furthermore, our digital footprint approach suggests that parental behavior, including more time spent at home, is an important contributor to this widening gap in educational outcomes.