This paper examines the rationale for trademark adoption and its impact on firm performance. We emphasize two functions of trademarks: protection and differentiation. Protection prevents competitors from using identical or confusingly similar brand names and logos. Differentiation makes it easier for consumers to tell the owner's brand apart from others. An industry equilibrium model with endogenous marketing and trademark adoption rationalizes three facts we document in the data. First, most firms never apply for a trademark, although the cost is negligible. Second, a firm's marketing generates positive spillovers to competitors' sales, and these spillovers arise only from firms without a trademark. Third, following a firm's first trademark application, the return to its own marketing rises while the spillover it receives from competitors' marketing disappears. We estimate the model using Chinese firm-level data from 1998 to 2007. Counterfactual exercises show that stronger trademark protection, greater market transparency, and trademark subsidies have heterogeneous effects across firms. Although these policies stimulate trademark adoption, they benefit only the largest firms. Smaller firms earn lower profits even after adopting trademarks, because higher adoption intensifies marketing competition and reduces the marketing spillovers they rely on.

2026: Asia-Pacific Industrial Organization Conference (scheduled), Symposium on World Economy and International Trade (Xiamen University)*; 2025: HKU PhD Workshop. (*by coauthor)

Selling in a foreign market is hard: a firm must build a customer base from scratch, earn a reputation, and learn unfamiliar demand. Consistent with this, new exporters typically enter small and expand only gradually. This pattern is hard to reconcile with models whose only friction is a fixed entry cost. We argue that firms face substantial demand barriers abroad. We study how they overcome demand barriers by investing in marketing. Using firm-market-specific price and quantity data from the Chinese textile industry, we separate a firm's demand advantage from its physical productivity and measure directly how marketing shapes demand. Reduced-form facts suggest that firms ramp up marketing sharply upon entry, and marketing raises sales in both markets through higher quantities rather than prices. We then estimate a dynamic model of export and marketing decisions with demand accumulation. Demand heterogeneity, rather than productivity, accounts for most sales variation (about 81% of export-sales variation versus 10% for productivity), and marketing raises demand in both markets while leaving markups largely unchanged. A counterfactual that sets new exporters' initial export demand to its steady-state level shows the demand barrier is first-order: removing it would raise their first-year export sales by about 72%, with the gap still around 37% by their sixth year. Marketing plays a central role in overcoming the demand barrier: shutting down the marketing channel roughly doubles the exit rate of young exporters and reduces survivors' export sales by 10 to 21% over their first six years.

2027: ASSA Annual Meeting (scheduled); 2026: Open Economy and World Economy Forum (Fudan University), Asia Pacific Trade Seminars, CES China Annual Conference, Hong Kong Economic Association Biennial Conference, The 8th Openness and Development Forum at Huazhong University of Science and Technology*, CUHK Summer School of Asia in the Global Economy, HKU and CITP Conference on Trade Policy and Inclusive Growth*, International Symposium on Geopolitical Risks and Trade*; 2025: 3rd HKU-UNSW Workshop on Firms and Industrial Dynamics*, Renmin University of China*, Binghamton University*, Central University of Finance and Economics*, SUFE Empirical IO Conference 2025*, HKU Brownbag*; 2024: CUHK-PKU Workshop on Innovation and Entrepreneurship*, Glasgow-Nankai International Workshop on Trade, Productivity and Development*, Journal of International Economics Summer School 2024. (*by coauthor)

We investigate the impact of on-campus housing on both academic and non-academic outcomes among undergraduate students. To identify causal effects, we leverage the housing allocation policy at a leading public university in Hong Kong, where local applicants receive hall offers in a randomly determined order conditional on the commuting time between home and campus. We find that living in a student dormitory decreases students' annual GPA by 0.12 points (0.18 standard deviations). There is also suggestive evidence that hall residents receive fewer job offers upon graduation. Several findings suggest that time reallocation is an important mechanism: hall residents visit the library less during the daytime and regular teaching weeks, and instead shift library use toward nighttime and examination weeks. We also find suggestive evidence that hall residents spend more time on extracurricular activities and less time studying. In addition, the GPA penalty is concentrated among residents whose roommates are from the same year of study or school, which is consistent with social interactions with similar peers crowding out study time. Our findings highlight the need to empirically evaluate the impact of on-campus student accommodation in East Asian universities rather than assuming that the positive effects from Western settings will automatically translate.

2025: Asian Economic Development Conference*; 2024: HKUST Brownbag*, HKU Applied Micro Workshop. (*by coauthor)