Stanford University

The Australia – U.S. Relationship in the 21st Century

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As the 21st century unfolds, some fundamentals remain the same including the abiding affinity between Australia and the United States. However as the world changes and evolves, so to must this relationship. The Asia-Pacific region continues to experience breakneck change including the emergence of China, the rapid economic development of the region and simmering security issues. How Australia and the U.S. relationship responds to these developments will help shape the relationship between our countries for decades to come.

The Honorable Joe Hockey is Australia’s Ambassador to the United States, taking up his posting in Washington in January 2016.

Mr. Hockey has had a long and distinguished career in public service. He first entered Parliament in 1996 as the Member for North Sydney and spent more than seventeen years on the front bench.

Mr. Hockey served as a Minister in a number of different portfolios including Financial Services, Small Business and Tourism, Human Services and Employment and Workplace Relations.

In 2013 Mr. Hockey was appointed Treasurer of the Commonwealth and was responsible for all economic policy including fiscal policy. He served as Chair of the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors in 2014 and a member of the leadership troika in 2015. As Treasurer he was a regular delegate to IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank and APEC meetings.

Previously Mr. Hockey served as a banking and finance lawyer with a major Australian law firm. He graduated from the University of Sydney with Bachelor degrees in Arts and Law.

This event is co-sponsored by the U.S. - Asia Security Initative and the Southeast Asia Program

His Excellency, the Honorable Joe Hockey <i>Australian Ambassador to the U.S. </i>
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Valuing Peace: The Effects of Financial Market Exposure on Votes and Political Attitudes

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- This talk is co-sponsored by the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies (SEED) -

Abstract: Financial markets expose individuals to the broader economy. Does participation in financial markets also lead citizens to re-evaluate the costs of conflict, their views on politics and even their voting decisions? Prior to the 2015 Israeli elections, we randomly assigned financial assets from Israeli and Palestinian companies to likely voters and gave them incentives to actively trade for up to seven weeks. Exposure to financial markets systematically shifted vote choices and increased support for peace initiatives. We delineate the mechanisms for this change and show that financial market exposure led to learning and reevaluation of the economic costs of conflict.

About the Speaker: Saumitra Jha is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and, by courtesy, of Economics and of Political Science. Saumitra's research focuses upon understanding the effectiveness of organizations and innovations that societies have developed to address the problems of violence and other political risks, and to seek new lessons for fostering peace and development. Saum holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to joining the GSB, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a Fellow of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University and received the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in Political Economy from the American Political Science Association in 2014 for his research on ethnic tolerance. Saumitra has consulted on economic and political risk issues for the United Nations/ WTO and the World Bank. 

 

Encina Hall, 2nd floor

Saumitra Jha Associate Professor of Political Economy Stanford University's Graduate School of Business
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Research in Progress (RIP): Michelle Mello, "Patients’ Experiences of Medical Error Disclosure and Reconciliation"

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Please note: All research in progress seminars are off-the-record unless otherwise noted. Any information about methodology and/or results are embargoed until publication.

The misery of the medical malpractice litigation process for all involved has led some hospitals to develop alternative ways to resolve medical injuries with patients.  In communication-and-resolution programs (CRPs), for example, hospitals disclose errors and adverse events, apologize and explain what happened, and where appropriate, proactively offer compensation.  Patients’ perceptions of these processes are not well understood. This presentation will report on an empirical study of patients’ experiences with disclosure and compensation offers, using interview data collected in 3 hospital systems.

 

Stanford Law School
Crown Building, Classroom 95
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305

Michelle Mello

(650) 725-3894
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Professor, Health Policy
Professor, Law
mello-scott_macdonald-profile.jpg JD, PhD

Michelle Mello is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Professor of Health Policy in the Department of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine.  She conducts empirical research into issues at the intersection of law, ethics, and health policy.  She is the author of more than 230 articles on medical liability, public health law, the public health response to COVID-19, pharmaceuticals and vaccines, biomedical research ethics and governance, health information privacy, and other topics.
 
The recipient of a number of awards for her research, Dr. Mello was elected to the National Academy of Medicine at the age of 40.  From 2000 to 2014, she was a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she directed the School’s Program in Law and Public Health.
 
Dr. Mello teaches courses in torts, public health law, and health policy.  She holds a J.D. from the Yale Law School, a Ph.D. in Health Policy and Administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an M.Phil. from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a B.A. from Stanford University. 

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Seminars

Reality-based election security

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Abstract:   There is a state of high anxiety about this year's election being "hacked" or "rigged". The media began speculating about the possibility when emails were stolen from the Democratic National Committee and, later, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, allegedly by state-sponsored hackers. Additionally, Donald Trump has been predicting that the election will be "rigged", worrying many of his supporters. New voter ID requirements have been imposed in many states in response to allegations of "voter fraud", but voting rights advocates worry that these requirements will disenfranchise many voters. In this talk, I will attempt a rational evaluation of election security risks and propose what we should do to address them.

About the Speaker: David L. Dill is the Donald E. Knuth Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he has been on the faculty for 29 years. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been working on policy issues in voting technology since 2003. He is the founder of VerifiedVoting.org, whose mission is to safeguard elections in the digital age, and continues to serve as a board director in that organization.  He was a principle investigator in the National Science Foundation's "ACCURATE" voting tresearch center center from 2006 to 2011. In 2004, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Pioneer Award" for spearheading and nurturing the popular movement for integrity and transparency in modern elections."

Encina Hall, 2nd floor

David Dill Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science Stanford University
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Effective Public Security and Democratic Accountability: Stanford Training Seminar

A Stanford Training Seminar for Law Enforcement Professionals

encina group shot The CNS delegation concludes its seminar with seminar with co-directors Beatriz Magaloni and Alberto Diaz Cayeros in a group shot outside
historic Encina Hall, home of the Freeman Spogli Institute and the site of the seminar.

The Stanford Program on Poverty and Governance delivered a five-day training course for the Planning Unit of the Mexican Comision Nacional de Seguridad (CNS) from October 11 to 15, 2016. The training was led by Professors Beatriz Magaloni and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, co-principal investigators of the State Department-funded research project “Citizen Trust and Evidence-Based Police Accountability and Professionalization in Mexico.” Learn more about the seminar from this report. To view event images click here.

 

A Stanford Training Seminar for Law Enforcement Professionals
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Seminars

Psychology of Political Risk in Autocracy

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Abstract:

Many authoritarian regimes use the threat of repression to suppress dissent. Theory from psychology suggests that emotions should affect how citizens perceive and process information about repression risk, and ultimately how they behave. I test the implications of this view for understanding dissent in autocracy by running a lab-in-the-field experiment with 671 opposition supporters in Zimbabwe. In the experiment, I randomly assign some participants to an exercise that induces a state of fear. The fear treatment reduces participation in a behavioral measure of dissent by 14-23%, and increases pessimism and risk aversion. These effects may lead to variation in real participation in dissent: self-efficacy, a psychological characteristic that influences emotional reactions to threats, is a better predictor of dissent than access to information and communication technology or strength of identification with the opposition. These effects suggest that fear may be used strategically by autocrats to suppress dissent.

 

Speaker Bio:

lauren young
Lauren Young is a Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL. Her research aims to understand how citizens make decisions when faced with the threat of political violence. Her dissertation uses a mix of experimental, quasi-experimental, and qualitative methods with more than 2,100 total participants to investigate how emotions influence decisions to participate in pro-democracy dissent using the case of Zimbabwe. Lauren is currently working on projects that test for similar effects in the context of narco-trafficking, violent crime, and police abuse. Lauren received her PhD in Political Science with distinction from Columbia University in May 2016 and holds a BA from Stanford University with honors in International Security Studies. She is also a non-resident postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Global Development.

Postdoctoral Fellow at CDDRL
Seminars

Singapore's Cartographic Cinema: Mapping an Identity

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Singapore brandishes an unusual post-colonial identity. As several of its eminent voices have suggested, the country remembers its colonial past with “no hangups.” Meanwhile the visibility of Singapore’s cinema has surged at festivals and in film criticism. Prof. Sim will argue that the films reflect the city-state’s distinctive location between post-colonialism and globalization. He will show how the films evince a local preoccupation with space, which is desperately scarce on the island nation and thus intensely politicized. He will explore how the films map, organize, and understand Singapore as a place, and Singapore’s place in the world, while retaining the ideological inflections of its post-colonial status.

Existing scholarship on cinema in Singapore dwells on how the films, as texts, respond to social realities, political power, and state ideology. These readings are legitimate and illustrative. But they do not adequately account for Singapore’s postcolonial identity and how that identity is expressed in a mapping impulse. Prof. Sim will go beyond this literature to analyze key films, art and museum exhibits, and other cultural artifacts as symptoms of Singapore’s intriguing but understudied fixation on space and place.

Gerald Sim is associate professor of film and media studies at Florida Atlantic University, and the author of The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (2014). His current book-in-progress, tentatively entitled Besides Hybridity: Postcolonial Poetics of Southeast Asian Cinema, is contracted with Indiana University Press. In 2016 and 2013 he was a visiting senior research fellow in the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute.

 

Gerald Sim 2016-17 Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Southeast Asia
Seminars

FSI Student Programs Info Session

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Join us for a conversation with FSI Director, Michael McFaul, as he showcases all the ways to get involved in student programs at FSI.

Light refreshments will be served. RSVP by 10/28 here.

 

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Michael A. McFaul

Encina Hall
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, Department of Political Science
Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
mcfaul_headshot_2025.jpg PhD

Michael McFaul is the Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, all at Stanford University. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995 and served as FSI Director from 2015 to 2025. He is also an international affairs analyst for MSNOW.

McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).

McFaul has authored ten books and edited several others, including, most recently, Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder, as well as From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia, (a New York Times bestseller) Advancing Democracy Abroad: Why We Should, How We Can; and Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin.

He is a recipient of numerous awards, including an honorary PhD from Montana State University; the Order for Merits to Lithuania from President Gitanas Nausea of Lithuania; Order of Merit of Third Degree from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine, and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford University. In 2015, he was the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University.

McFaul was born and raised in Montana. He received his B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages and his M.A. in Soviet and East European Studies from Stanford University in 1986. As a Rhodes Scholar, he completed his D. Phil. in International Relations at Oxford University in 1991. 

International Working Group on Russian Sanctions

The International Working Group on Russian Sanctions aims to provide expertise and experience to governments and companies around the world by assisting with the formulation of sanctions proposals that will increase the cost to Russia of invading Ukraine, and support democratic Ukraine in the defense of its territorial integrity and national sovereignty.
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Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
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Fertility Restrictions and Life Cycle Outcomes: Evidence from the One Child Policy in China

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Wei Huang uses the experience of China's One Child Policy to examine how fertility restrictions affect economic and social outcomes over the lifetime. The One Child Policy imposed a birth quota and heavy penalties for “out-of-plan” births. Using variation in the fertility penalties across provinces over time, He examines how fertility restrictions imposed early in the lives of individuals affected their educational attainment, marriage and fertility decisions, and later life economic outcomes. Exposure to stricter fertility restrictions when young leads to higher education, more white-collar jobs, delayed marriage, and lower fertility. Further consequences include higher household income, consumption, and saving. Finally, exposure to stricter fertility restrictions in early life increases female empowerment as measured by an increase in the fraction of households headed by women, female-oriented consumption and gender-equal opinions. Overall, fertility restrictions imposed when agents are young have powerful effects throughout the life cycle.

Wei Huang is a Post-doctoral Fellow in Aging and Health Economics at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His main research studies public economics, labor economics, and health economics. He is interested in the topics such as health, education, ethnicity, and China. Wei received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 2016. He received an M.A in economics from National School of Development at Peking University in 2011, and a B.A. in physics from School of Physics at Peking University in 2008.

 

Wei Huang Post-doctoral Fellow in Aging and Health Economics, the National Bureau of Economic Research
Seminars

Do Startups Learn When They Fail? Using Crowdfunding Data to Compare When and If Entrepreneurs Learn from Experience and Observation

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Do startups learn from their own past experiences? What about observing other entrepreneurs' experiences? Using the results of her recent study on tech ventures on Kickstarter, Jaclyn Selby will share the circumstances under which startups do - and do NOT - learn from previous success and failure. She will also explore whether startups learn best from prior experience in related or in unrelated industries.

Speaker Bio

Jaclyn Selby's research is at the intersection of technology, management and policy. She focuses on competitive dynamics in high tech and media industries, emphasizing innovation, startups, and intellectual property. She joins Stanford from a postdoctoral fellowship at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Her work has been published in Communications & Strategies, Foreign Policy Digest, and Intellibridge Asia.  Jaclyn holds a PhD from the University of Southern California, an MA from Georgetown University, and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Prior to PhD life, Jaclyn was a Senior Researcher heading federally-funded tech strategy projects at Project Argus, a leader in disease and disaster intelligence. Her group worked with partners at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Open Source Center, the University of Iowa Avian Flu prediction market, and the Al Fornace molecular biology lab. Prior to Argus, she was Research & Marketing Director of the Style and Image Network, a boutique consultancy, and a geopolitical analyst (Intellibridge, Castle Asia, Courage Services). A U.S. citizen, Jaclyn was raised overseas in Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore.

 

Agenda

4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking

RSVP Required

 
For more information about the Silicon Valley-New Japan Project please visit: http://www.stanford-svnj.org/
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Stanford Silicon Valley-New Japan Project
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