Christine Wen

Latest updates (2022.8.16):

I'm starting at Texas A&M University as assistant professor in Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning!

New blog on sustainable community development coming soon

See Mapping Amazon 2.0 here

about

Dr. Christine Wen is an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University. She specializes in sustainable economic development planning. Her current research focuses on the impact of business incentives and other growth-oriented policies on social equity.

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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research

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tax incentives and educational inequality

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 intergovernmental accountability and the impact of tax abatement on educational inequality. Findings suggest that the costs of tax incentives are inequitably distributed, which could worsen 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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writings

report

April 2020

Christine Wen. Putting Pension Costs in Context: How Corporate Tax Breaks are Diverting State Revenue Needed for Public Employees' Retirement.

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talks

Past and upcoming conference presentations, invited talks, and interviews

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Esri User Conference

July 2022

"Where do Amazon.com locate its warehouses?" (in absentia)

LERA@ASSA Conference

January 2022

"How tax incentives constrain K-12 education." Delivered at the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA) Conference in Boston, Massachusetts (virtual).

IRE DBEI Symposium

October 2021

"Researching the impact of tax abatements on educational inequality: A How-to Guide." Delivered at the Investigative Reporters and Editors inaugural Diversity, Belonging, Equity, and Inclusion (DBEI) Symposium in Baltimore, Maryland.

ACSP Conference

October 2021

"Making the students pay? The impact of tax incentives on school finance." Delivered at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Annual Conference in Miami, Florida.

Interview

May 2021

Interview with America's Work Force (AWF) Union Podcast on new report "Abating our future: How students pay for corporate tax breaks"

Interview

April 2021

Interview with In the Public Interest (ITPI) on "Corporate subsidies not only rarely work, but they're also starving public schools"

Interview

March 2021

Interview with the Sanctuary for Independent Media, Hudson Mohawk Radio Network on how "Corporate tax breaks hurt schools"

IRE Conference

November 2020

"Using the Tax Break Tracker." Delivered virtually at the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Conference.

Training

November 2019

"Public subsidy research in union organizing." Delivered at the AFL-CIO Strategic Training for Intermediate/Advanced Researchers in Silver Springs, Maryland.

ACSP Conference

October 2018

"Migrant housing ownership in urban China: Evidence from survey data." Delivered at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Annual Conference in Buffalo, New York.

Conference

July 2018

"Development, education, and the urban integration of rural migrants in interior China." Delivered at the 2018 International Conference of China Urban Development in Glasgow, U.K.

Conference

May 2018

"Linking fiscal stress and social equity: A municipal toolbox." Delivered at the New York State City Managers Association (NYSCMA) Annual Conference in Ithaca, New York.

UAA Conference

April 2018

"Development, education, and the urban integration of rural migrants in interior China." Delivered at the Urban Affairs Association (UAA) Annual Conference in Toronto, Canada.

Symposium

April 2018

"Development, education, and the urban integration of rural migrants in interior China." Delivered at the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Student Symposium "China in Transition" in Ithaca, New York.

AAG Conference

April 2017

"Engineering urbanization and growth in China's poor periphery." Delivered at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

AAG Conference

April 2016

"Urbanization as development: Understanding China's new growth strategy." Delivered at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Conference in San Francisco, California.

ACSP Conference

November 2015

"Restrictiveness of TEL (tax and expenditure limits) and impact on local fiscal stress." Delivered at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Annual Conference in Houston, Texas

Conference

December 2014

"New York property tax cap: Implications for local fiscal health." Delivered at the 2014 Conference "Local Fiscal Stress: State: State Austerity Policy and Creative Local Response" in Saratoga Springs, New York.

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