Christine Wen

Latest updates (2022.5.3):

Stay tuned for reports on how tax abatements affect NY and SC schools

Check out my analysis of state transparency practices

Read our eight recommendations for better tax abatement data here.

See Mapping Amazon 2.0 here.

about

Christine Wen leads the work on economic development incentives at Good Jobs First. Her current research focuses on the impact of property tax abatements on educational inequality. She also actively works to promote data transparency and regularly engages with unions, news media, think tanks, governments, and universities.

Christine received her Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University in August 2019. Supported mainly by the C.V. Starr Fellowship, her interdisciplinary dissertation research bridges scholarship from development sociology, critical geography, political economy, and labor studies. During this time, she worked as a teaching assistant at Cornell University for courses on American planning practice, global cities, and inferential statistics. She was also part of an award-winning team that studied how inequitable tax systems contribute to fiscal stress in upstate New York.

While completing her master's degree at Columbia University, she spent a year researching at the Earth Institute how climate cycles affect groundwater levels. Prior to that, she spent two summers working for the cosmic microwave background radiation group at Princeton University while completing a bachelor's degree in physics there. Before that, at age 15, she received the professional performer's diploma (ARCT) from the Canadian Royal Conservatory of Music with First-Class Honors with Distinctions.

Christine hails from Vancouver, Canada. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, writing, playing the piano, boxing, cooking, thrifting, boating, protecting her plants from her cat Salem, and roaming the woods of Northern Virginia with her 80-lb boxer mix Arthur.

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tax incentives and educational inequality

(ongoing)

This project is part of an emerging area of research that aims to center children and schools in economic development planning and seek community-based solutions to wicked problems. One common tool is tax incentives, many of which divert funds from schools and accomplish dubious results. Places compete with one another by offering ever-bigger incentive packages, even though all might be better off if no one does. The power imbalance between the growth coalitions and public service providers creates a thorny dilemma that requires collective effort to address. The papers in this series examine the importance of data transparency in mutual accountability and the impact of tax abatement on educational inequality. All research data are available to the public for free on this platform, and parsing scripts are constantly being improved to enable large-scale data extraction. Findings suggest that tax incentives could be associated with widening socioeconomic, racial, and regional inequality.

tax caps and local government revenues

Almost all U.S. state governments impose some form of limitation on their taxing and spending by local governments. This research contributed a 50-state database that disassembles these limits to quantify their stringency for different types of local governments (Colorado's TABOR wins this one). The measure is then used to test the impact of tax caps on local governments' revenue structures and found that more stringent TELs restrict counties' overall revenues and force cities to shift to alternative, often more regressive, revenue sources as well as incur more debt. State aid mostly does not make up the difference. These findings are troubling as counties provide many critical social services. This research suggests that states need to tailor their tax caps to local conditions.

informal schooling for China's migrant children

One key feature of urbanization in contemporary China is the exclusion of rural migrants from certain basic urban services. To this day, about two million migrant children are still denied access to urban public schools. This exclusion has resulted in the proliferation of low-fee private schools in China's cities that almost exclusively serve rural migrant children. Scholars disagree on the extent to which low-fee private schools can adequately supply education to poor children in developing countries. This research contributes to the debate with a qualitative study in interior China where the privatization of education intersects with rural-urban migration, using grounded theory to examine how informal schooling affects settlement and integration for migrant families. Fieldwork in the country’s interior region reveals that migrant schools are oriented toward meeting the immediate needs of migrant families but do so at the cost of children’s future prospects and thus perpetuate urban inequality.

when and where to put down roots

This project examines the determinants of urban homeownership in destination cities for China's rural migrant families. For the past few years, the country's urbanization policy has focused on expanding social provisions for rural migrants so as to encourage them to put down roots in the city. There are two dominant theories in the international literature on the relationship between housing ownership and welfare access. Competing theories suggest that housing can be either a substitute for or a result of welfare. Using national survey data, this research shows that ties to the city such as enrollment in local pensions and health insurance as well as co-habitation with family are associated with a higher likelihood of homeownership. This suggests that rural migrants might be more willing to purchase homes, which is a policy goal, if the risk and precarity are lowered and that cities should adopt a family-friendly approach.

engineering urbanization

This is a doctoral dissertation project looking at Chinese government policy on migrant integration and local implementation of this central directive. By 2013-2014, a plan had been formulated to get more rural residents settled in cities and entitled to the same services as urban dwellers. However, the geopolitical configuration that has resulted from decades of regionally uneven policies presents a major roadblock. As megacities increasingly tighten restrictions on migrants, this research investigates the approach of ordinary cities toward receiving and integrating rural mgirants.

groundwater management and governance

Groundwater is a common-pool resource that poses unique governance challenges. This research investigates the temporal and spatial relationship between groundwater levels and extraction rates, precipitation anomalies, and climate cycles. The results show sensitivity to the Pacific decadal oscillations and widespread decline, particularly the central and southern Ogallala aquifer, lower Mississippi basin, the southeast basin, and the Atlantic Coastal Plain. California and Nevada were chosen for case studies for their contrasting approaches to managing groundwater in close proximity. These show that more fragmented governance as is the case of California is linked to spatial unevenness in groundwater trends as well as data collection frequency, suggesting the need for state oversight.

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Published and forthcoming articles, reports, etc.

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report

May 2022

Christine Wen. "Corporate subsidies versus public education: How tax abatements cost New York public schools."

Link available soon.

report

May 2022

Christine Wen. "The Revenue Impact of Corporate Tax Incentives on South Carolina Public Schools 2017-2021."

Link available soon.

report

April 2022

Financial Exposure: Rating the States on Economic Development Transparency (p. 12-35 of 36).

Christine Wen

about

research

tax incentives and educational inequality

tax caps and local government revenues

informal schooling for China's migrant children

when and where to put down roots

engineering urbanization

groundwater management and governance

writings

report

report

report

storymap

white paper

op-ed

op-ed

op-ed

report

op-ed

refereed article

white paper

refereed article

storymap

refereed article

book review

issue brief

white paper

white paper

report

Blog posts

GJF Blog

GJF Blog

GJF Blog

GJF Blog

GJF Blog

GJF Blog

GJF Blog

talks

LERA@ASSA Conference

IRE DBEI Symposium

ACSP Conference

Interview

Interview

Interview

IRE Conference

Training

ACSP Conference

Conference

Conference

UAA Conference

Symposium

AAG Conference

AAG Conference

ACSP Conference

Conference

CV

EMPLOYMENT

Senior Research Associate in Economic Development at Good Jobs First

EDUCATION

Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning, Cornell University

M.S. in Urban Planning, Columbia University

A.B. in Physics, Princeton University

PUBLICATIONS

Writings

AWARDS

Cornell University C.V. Starr Fellowship ($21,620)

Cornell University East Asia Program Travel Grant ($1,250)

Institute for the Social Sciences Research Travel Grant ($2,000)

Cornell University Research Travel Grant ($2,000)

Cornell University Departmental Research Travel Grant ($1,500)

Various Cornell University Conference Travel Grants ($1,315)

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

See Talks

MEDIA COVERAGE

Quoted in MinnPost: "There's little evidence that film and TV tax credits work. Why Minnesota lawmakers funded a new one anyway. Click here to read.

Quoted in Chalkbeat Philadelphia: "Report stating Philadelphia schools lose $112 million a year to tax breaks is incomplete, city says" Click here to read.

Quoted in The Philadelphia Inquirer: "Philly schools lose more money to tax breaks than any district in the country, a new report says." Click here to read.

Quoted in Bloomberg CityLab: "What corporate tax breaks mean for school funding." Click here to read.

Lead-author report featured in WCSC Live 5 News interview with the Executive Director of Good Jobs First