Co-authored Paper by Professor Chen Qiang Officially Published in International Authoritative Journal Journal of Applied Econometrics

Recently, the co-authored paper Spread Regression, Skewness Regression, and Kurtosis Regression with an Application to the US Wage Structure by Professor Chen Qiang from the School of Economics, Shandong University, was officially published in Journal of Applied Econometrics, an international authoritative journal. Professor Chen Qiang is the first author, and Professor Zhijie Xiao from Boston College is the second author and corresponding author.

Quantile regression provides a powerful tool for investigating the effects of covariates on key quantiles of a conditional distribution, but it is still unclear how covariates affect the overall shape of the conditional distribution. By using quantile regression and quantile-based measures of spread, skewness, and kurtosis, this paper proposes spread regression, skewness regression, and kurtosis regression as empirical tools to quantify the effects of covariates on the spread, skewness, and kurtosis of the conditional distribution. This methodology is applied to US wage data during 1980-2019 with substantive findings, and a comparison is made with the moment-based robust approach. In addition, this paper decomposes changes in the spread into composition effects and structural effects to clarify rising inequality. We also provide the Stata commands spreadreg, skewreg, and kurtosisreg (available from the Statistical Software Components (SSC) archive) for easy implementation of spread, skewness, and kurtosis regressions. Users can download and install the three commands and the demonstration dataset simultaneously by entering the command "ssc install skewreg, all replace" in Stata.

Chen Qiang is a Professor and Ph.D. Supervisor in Quantitative Economics at the School of Economics, Shandong University, and Deputy Director (in charge of work) of the Taiyue Economic Research Center. His main research fields are econometrics, machine learning, and economic history. He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Economics from Peking University in 1992 and 1995 respectively, and then taught at Peking University. He obtained his Master's degree in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Economics from Northern Illinois University, USA in 2007. In 2010, he was selected into the Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University. He has published papers in authoritative domestic and foreign journals such as Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Oxford Economic Papers (Lead Article), Journal of Comparative Economics, Economica, Stata Journal (Lead Article), Management World, China Economic Quarterly, and The Journal of World Economy. He has also authored undergraduate textbooks Introductory Econometrics with Stata Applications, graduate textbooks Advanced Econometrics with Stata Applications, Machine Learning with R Applications, Machine Learning with Python Applications.