Christine Wen

Latest updates:

Read our eight recommendations for better tax abatement data here.

See Mapping Amazon 2.0 here.

Presentation at LERA@ASSA meeting. (video available later)

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 local government transparency in tax spending and public access to data. Her projects have engaged unions, news media, think tanks, community organizations, 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 in development sociology, critical geography, political economy, and labor studies. She also completed a side project on local government tax and expenditure limits in the U.S. During this time, she worked as a teaching assistant at Cornell University for courses on American planning practice, global cities, and statistics.

While completing her master's degree at Columbia University, she spent a year conducting research at the Earth Institute on the impact of climate on groundwater levels since the 1930s. 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. And before that, at age 15, she received the professional performer's diploma (ARCT) from the Canadian Royal Conservatory of Music--first-class honors with distinctions.

Christine hails from Vancouver, Canada. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, writing creatively, 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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How economic development tax abatements constrain K-12 education

(ongoing)

No one can deny that an educated workforce is critical to economic development. Yet many economic development policies ignore or even undermine education. Tax abatements, in particular, impose a cost on school districts because they result in foregone revenue for schools. Even if the state reimburses this loss, that just means the cost is spread out over everyone. And if tax abatements do result in economic growth, the influx of students can cause great strain for school budgets if the revenues needed to support the new students aren't there. Academic research on the impact of tax abatements on school finance is scant. This is likely due to the previous lack of data: Tax spending is opaque in many places to begin with, and school revenues are often given away by counties and municipalities. Fortunately, the staffers at Good Jobs First not only championed for and won an accounting rule that mandates disclosure of tax abatements by jurisdiction, but also collected and published the 2019 foregone revenue data for all U.S. school districts. This research avails of the incredible resource from Good Jobs First to study the impact of tax abatements on K-12 educational funding effort, adequacy, and progressivity, as well as other indicators of educational quality.

Educating rural migrant children in interior China

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. Some argue that they are a market-based, community-led solution to government failure and provide low-income families with more alternatives. Others maintain that inadequate funding and regulation prevent these private schools from providing quality education. This research contributes to the debate with a qualitative study in China where privatization of education intersects with rural-urban migration. It relies on the grounded theory approach to examine how low-fee private schools aid or hinder migrant children’s settlement and integration in the host city. 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.

Putting down roots: Urban homeownership among China's migrants

For the past few years, China’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. One suggests a substitution effect wherein housing purchase constitutes a form of security that makes up for the lack of access to welfare. The other, from immigration studies, suggests that integration in the form of gaining access to social security in the host society encourages housing purchase. Using national survey data, this research explores the determinants of housing ownership among China’s rural migrant households in their city of residence, focusing particularly on access to urban social insurance. The results show that institutional ties to the city such as enrollment in local pensions and health insurance as well as families staying united are associated with a higher likelihood of homeownership. This suggests that rural migrants might be more willing to purchase homes if the risk and precarity they typically experience are lowered. To make urbanization more sustainable, the government should aim at making cities more family-friendly and expanding alternatives to employment-based social insurance schemes.

Tax caps and their impact on local government revenue in the U.S.

Almost all U.S. state governments impose some form of tax and expenditure limits (TELs) on their local governments. These can restrict how (and how much) cities, counties, and school districts raise their revenues. For this research, we built a 50-state database of all local TELs and created a measure for their severity or stringency. This measure can be disaggregated by the type of tax limitation (rate limit, levy ceiling, total expenditure, assessment increase, etc.), by attributes (magnitude, exclusions, and override provisions), and by the type of government (county, municipality, and school district). We then tested the impact of TELs 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.

Groundwater resources in the U.S. and their management

Groundwater is an important natural resource that poses challenges to governance. This research investigates the spatial and temporal patterns in groundwater and investigates the relationship between its levels and extraction rates, precipitation anomalies, and climate cycles. Wells across the continental U.S. are clustered by their long-term trends and mapped. The results show alarming widespread declines in groundwater levels, particularly the central and southern Ogallala aquifer, lower Mississippi basin, the southeast basin, and the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Deeper wells tend to have greater relative declines, possibly because they take longer to recharge. Overall, groundwater is sensitive to extraction and long-term climate cycle, particularly the Pacific decadal oscillations. Case studies of California and Nevada are used to supplement these findings, as they represent contrasting localized and centralized groundwater management, respectively. 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 greater state oversight.

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Writings

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December 2021

Storymap

Christine Wen, Greg LeRoy, Kasia Tarczynska, and Arlene Martinez. "Mapping Amazon 2.0: Where the online giant locates and why."

Christine Wen

About

Research

How economic development tax abatements constrain K-12 education

Educating rural migrant children in interior China

Putting down roots: Urban homeownership among China's migrants

Tax caps and their impact on local government revenue in the U.S.

Groundwater resources in the U.S. and their management

Writings

Storymap

White paper

OP-ED

Op-Ed

OP-ED

Report

Op-ed

Refereed Article

White paper

Refereed article

Report

StoryMap

Refereed article

Book review

Issue Brief

White paper

White paper

Blog posts

GJF Blog

GJF Blog

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

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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

Lead-author report featured in "Costly corporate tax breaks are taking away money to improve South Carolina's schools" by Kendall Deas in The State. Click here to read.

Lead-author report featured in "Tracking the elusive tax dodge" by Paul Bowers in Brutal South. Click here to read.