He also serves as a Research Fellow at IZA in Germany, a Research Fellow at China Institute for Income Distribution in Beijing, and Consultant at The World Bank. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Rutgers University in 2011. His research is in the areas of labor economics and applied econometrics in which he focuses on minimum wages, immigration, and rural-urban migrants in China. He has been a visiting/teaching scholar at IZA, GATE-LSE Lyon in France, National Taiwan Normal University, and Nanjing University of Finance and Economics. His paper has been published in Review of International Economics, Review of Development Economics, Research in Labor Economics, Economics Letters, Singapore Economic Review, IZA Journal of Labor Policy, and China Economic Review.