Jiawu Dai

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About

Jiawu Dai is an emerging scholar whose research sits at the intersection of labor economics, international trade, and the economics of education. His work explores how structural economic changes—particularly the rise of automation and global supply chains—reshape labor markets and human capital development. Dai’s most-cited paper, “Higher education expansion and robot imports: evidence from China” (2023), investigates a pressing contemporary question: how does the rapid adoption of industrial robots affect the value of a college degree? By leveraging China’s massive higher education expansion as a natural experiment, he provides novel causal evidence that automation can erode the wage premium for new graduates, while simultaneously pushing less-educated workers into routine-displaced jobs. Though early in his career, Dai’s research has already garnered attention for its timely, policy-relevant insights into the unintended consequences of technological change. His work speaks directly to debates about the future of work, the returns to education in an automated age, and the role of trade in shaping domestic labor outcomes. For students and researchers interested in the economic forces transforming developing economies, Dai offers a rigorous, data-driven lens on the challenges facing a new generation of workers.