His research covers a broad range of topics, including marriage, crime, fertility, savings, education, health, and old-age support.
Junsen Zhang and William Chan (1999) reject Gary Becker's conjecture that dowry and bride price are two sides of the coin and serve to clear the marriage market and provide an alternative analysis.
[14] Lena Edlund, Hongbin Li, Junjian Yi, and Junsen Zhang (2013) show that China's sex ratio imbalance incentivizes Chinese men to engage in crime.
In a recent work with David Ong and Yu Yang, Junsen Zhang shows that the sex ratio imbalance in China mainly affects high-income women and lessens their chances of getting married.
[17] In the early 1990s, Junsen Zhang pioneered the use of micro data in the examination of the determinants of Chinese fertility and compliance with China's "one-child" policy.
[18][19][20] Hongbin Li and Junsen Zhang (2007) show that the one-child policy reduces birth rate and thus has a short-run positive effect on China's economic growth.
Yuk-fai Fong and Junsen Zhang (2001) prove that Pierre-André Chiappori's collective model of household decision making can be extended to allow the identification of independent and spousal leisure.
[27] Hongbin Li, Mark Rosenzweig, and Junsen Zhang (2010) explore the roles of altruism, favoritism, and guilt in family resource allocation.
[28] They find that a twin who was sent down to the countryside during China's cultural revolution, in comparison with his or her co-twin who stayed in the cities, received a larger amount of wedding gifts from the parents.
In two joint works with Kazuo Nishimura, Junsen Zhang shows that the social security program undermines Pareto efficiency of an economy as long as parents can determine their fertility.
Besides those well-known studies, Junsen Zhang's research on the returns to education in China has attracted wide interests from scholars and policy makers.
[38] Together with Hongbin Li, Pak-Wai Liu, and Linda Yung, Junsen Zhang is the first to collect and use a sample of twins in China to identify the returns to education using the within-twin method.
In a joint work with Hongbin Li, Pak-Wai Liu, and Ning Ma, Junsen Zhang uses the Chinese twin data to show that members of the communist party have higher endowments compared with non-members.
[41] Mark Rosenzweig and Junsen Zhang (2013) explain the closing gender gap in education by the rising returns to skills and women's comparative advantage in brain-intensive tasks and use variations in the birth weights of Chinese twins to test their explanation.