A growing literature finds high returns to firms connected to legislative office. Less attention has been paid to benefits from bureaucratic connections and to organizations beyond for-profit firms. Using new data recording the first post-bureaucracy position occupied by all former civil servants in Japan, Incerti reveals a bifurcated job market in which the highest-ranking civil servants from the most prestigious ministries retire into for-profit firms while others join non-profit and public organizations. Incerti will show that for-profit firms receive larger government loans and stock price boosts following bureaucratic hires, and that these effects are driven by hires from prestigious economic ministries. Incerti will also show that non-profits leverage their bureaucratic hires by receiving higher value contracts in periods when former officials are in director positions at the organization. While top civil servants are therefore of value to for-profit firms, others find post bureaucracy employment in non-profits supported by government funding.

This event is part of APARC's Contemporary Asia Seminar Series.

Trevor Incerti is an Assistant Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam and Visiting Assistant Professor in Modern and Contemporary Japanese Politics at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service Asian Studies Program. Incerti’s main area of research is in comparative political economy, with a focus on the role of money in politics and business influence in politics. Additionally, his research explores how economic stimuli shape political behavior and preferences. Much of his work focuses on East Asia, particularly Japan. He also conducts research in quantitative methods, where he is particularly interested in the reliability and validity of measurement strategies. Incerti’s research is published in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Political Analysis, among other outlets. Incerti received his Ph.D. from Yale University and B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is also an Expert at the Leiden Asia Centre and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Prior to academia, he worked in data science and economic consulting.

Taiwan is host to a panoply of popular spiritual-religious practices that reach back to the 17th century. Since 1987, these folk institutions have proliferated, blurring among other things the boundary between secularism and religiosity. They permeate different facets of contemporary Taiwanese society, from politics to technology, grassroot movements to elections. Regardless of faction, political and social groups negotiate and exert new configurations of social power in this spiritual space, which is also used transnationally. This talk focuses on the most influential among them and discusses how one may approach such a study in new and interdisciplinary ways.

This event is part of APARC's Contemporary Asia Seminar Series.

Jing Tsu is Jonathan D. Spence Chair Professor of Comparative Literature & East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. She holds an affiliation with the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs and has also taught in the Grand Strategy program. Her research spans cultural and social history, nationalism, diaspora, and history of science and technology. Her most recent book, Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern (Penguin Random House, 2022), examines how the Chinese written script negotiated its way into the technological age of global communications dominated by the western alphabet. The book was named a 2023 Pulitzer Finalist. Her current research focuses on the social and political life of spirituality and technology in Taiwan.

Skyline Scholars Seminar Series

Tuesday, February 4, 2025 | 1:00 pm -2:30 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

The Anatomy of Chinese Innovation: Insights on Patent Quality and Ownership

In this study we look at the evolution of patenting in China from 1985-2019. We develop a new method to measure the importance of an individual patent for innovation based on the use of a Large Language Model to process patent text data and a new theory of the innovation process. We also classify patent ownership using a comprehensive business registry. We highlight three insights. First, patents that are important for innovation have become less important on average. Second, knowledge within China has become more important than knowledge outside of China for directing innovation in China. Finally, knowledge produced by Chinese entities within China has become more important than knowledge produced by foreign entities.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar.

About the Speaker 
 

Loren Brandt is the Noranda Chair Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto specializing in the Chinese economy. He is also a research fellow at the IZA (The Institute for the Study of Labor) in Bonn, Germany. He has published widely on the Chinese economy in leading economic journals and been involved in extensive household and enterprise survey work in both China and Vietnam. With Thomas Rawski, he completed Policy, Regulation, and Innovation in China’s Electricity and Telecom Industries (Cambridge University Press, 2019), an interdisciplinary effort analyzing the effect of government policy on the power and telecom sectors in China. He was also co-editor and major contributor to China’s Great Economic Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which provides an integrated analysis of China’s unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. Brandt was also one of the area editors for Oxford University Press’ five-volume Encyclopedia of Economic History (2003). His current research focuses on issues of entrepreneurship and firm dynamics, industrial policy and innovation and  economic growth and structural change.

Interested in meeting with Professor Brandt one-on-one? 
Sign up to speak with him during his office hours: 
Wednesday, 1/29 or 2/12 | 2:00-5:00 PM 

Please schedule a meeting in advance and use your Stanford email to log in. 

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

Talk Title: The Recent Evolution of US Health Care Spending

Glied’s principal areas of research are in health policy reform and mental health care policy. She has written or co-edited books on health care reform, mental health policy, and health economics. She has served as the Dean of NYU's Graduate School of Public Service, a professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia, a member of the U.S. Senate, a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, and a member of the Clinton Health Care Task Force.

Talk Title: Hospital Mergers and Quality 

Eric's research examines questions of health economics and health policy, with a focus on economics and policy in the perioperative setting. Current research topics include the economics of treatments for chronic pain, as well as how physician practice organization affects outcomes and costs.
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Winter 2025)

Friday, February 7, 2025 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Homemade Foreign Trading: Insider Evasion in China’s Stock Connect Program

Using cross-border holding data from all custodians—financial institutions that safeguard and manage assets—in China’s Stock Connect program, we provide evidence that Chinese mainland insiders evaded see-through surveillance, a tracking mechanism to monitor the true beneficiaries of financial transactions, by engaging in round-tripping trades that disguise domestic capital as foreign investments. Following the 2018 regulatory reform of Northbound Investor Identification, which enhanced regulatory oversight and identification of investors, the correlation between insider trading and northbound flows—capital moving from offshore markets into mainland-listed stocks—weakens. Additionally, the reform reduced the return predictability of these flows, meaning that insider activity within northbound flows no longer strongly predicts future stock performance. This reduction in return predictability is particularly pronounced among less prestigious foreign custodians and cross-operating mainland custodians, who were more commonly used by mainland insiders to conceal their activities. Our analysis highlights the critical role of regulatory cooperation in managing capital market integration and addressing cross-border regulatory arbitrage.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker 
 

Professor Zhiguo He is the James Irvin Miller Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He is a financial economist whose expertise covers financial markets, financial institutions, and macroeconomics broadly. He is also conducting academic research on Chinese financial markets, and writing academic articles on new progress in the area of cryptocurrency and blockchains. Before joining Stanford GSB, he was on the faculty of Chicago Booth from 2008 to 2023, where he received tenure in 2015 and led Becker Friedman Institute China from 2020 to 2023.

His research has been published in leading academic journals in finance and economics. After serving as associate editors for several leading academic journals, He served as the guest editor of the Review of Finance ”Special Issue on China” and currently serves as the editor of the Review of Asset Pricing Studies.

Professor He received his bachelor and master degrees from the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University before receiving his PhD from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2008. 

 

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

Talk Title: Health Impacts of Pandemic-era Food Assistance Policies: A Quasi-experimental Study

Dr. Rita Hamad is a social epidemiologist and the Director of the Social Policies for Health Equity Research (SPHERE) Center at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her research examines the health effects of social and economic policies using interdisciplinary quasi-experimental methods to generate actionable evidence to inform policymaking. She serves as an Advisory Editor for the journal Social Science & Medicine and an Associate Editor at Health Affairs Scholar. In 2020-2022, she was the James C. Puffer American Board of Family Medicine / National Academy of Medicine Fellow. She provides consultation to state and federal legislators on the design of poverty alleviation and social safety net policies. She has over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including many in top health policy, clinical, and epidemiology journals, and her research has been featured in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Hill. Dr. Hamad received a PhD in Epidemiology from Stanford, an MD from UCSF, master’s degrees from UC Berkeley, and an AB from Harvard University. She saw patients as a family physician for 10 years in safety net clinics throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, although she is no longer a practicing doctor.