Each year an interdisciplinary cohort gets together in the Design School of Stanford for a course on Designing Liberation Technologies.  Students work with NGOs in Kenya to identify pressing social issues, especially in Nairobi’s largest slum – Kibera, for which they come up with mobile applications during the course.  This week, five teams will present their ideas to deal with problems such as women’s safety, finding the best source of water, helping people who lose vital documents, etc.

The presentations include three fresh projects and two projects where work is on to implement the project on the ground.  This seminar is especially a good opportunity for students who are considering the course in the next season.

China and some other Asian countries have experienced a large surplus of men of marriageable age. The existing literature studies the impact of sex imbalance using aggregate sex ratios, such as at the county, city, or province level. However, these studies may miss important impacts on health and behavior because the relevance of surplus sons to family decisions mainly stems from pressure conveyed through social interactions with the local reference group.

This paper draws from unique social network data, collected from households' long-term spontaneous gift exchange records (li dan), combined with household panel data from 18 Chinese villages to explore the prevalence of men's localized pressure to get married. The surveyed villages are home to Chinese ethnic minorities, which largely circumvents endogenous fertility decisions on the first-born child due to the implementation of One Child Policy and its associated relaxations afterwards. To identify the effect of pressure to find wives for their sons on parental risky behavior, we focus on comparing families with a first-born boy versus a first-born girl and distinguish the network spillover effect from the direct effect.

The spatial econometric decompositions suggest that the pressure mainly originates from a few friends with unmarried sons and unbalanced sex ratios in the friendship networks, though own village sex ratio and having an unmarried son also affects parental risk-taking behavior. The results are consistent across specifications allowing for long-run and short-run effects. We also find similar patterns for parental working hours, their likelihood to engage in entrepreneurial activities and decision to migrate. In contrast, parents with a daughter do not demonstrate this pattern. Since the sex ratio imbalance in China will probably worsen in the next decade, disentangling the real sources of marriage market pressure may help design policies to improve parental well-being.

Dr. Xi Chen's main research interests involve health economics and development economics in the developing contexts. He recently completed his PhD in applied economics at Cornell. His research seeks to better understand how social interactions affect health behavior and outcomes, how socioeconomic status drives social competition. Most of his current work draws on primary data from China and secondary data from India and Indonesia.

David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and an affiliated faculty member at CISAC. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, and Estonia. His latest book is Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad. He is currently working on a project in collaboration with James Fearon on civil wars in the past half-century. From that project, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War" has appeared in the American Political Science Review. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

About the seminar

Does labor mobility matter for innovation more in some countries than in others? Based on theoretical considerations of the economic systems literature we argue that labor flexibility has different innovation effects depending on national-level institutions. This talk further argues that institutional constraints may be encountered by creating functional equivalents. The analysis is based on career histories in the videogames industry. The videogames industry is structured differently between the best performing countries U.S. and Japan. This raises two issues on human capital diversity: How does composition of human capital affect innovation? How do people react towards institutional constraints in the labor market? Contrasting approaches on the systematic relations between the structure of labor markets and the dynamics of innovation is first introduced, the seminar will then present an empirical case which is based on the career histories of 39.439 videogame developers between 1999 and 2009.

This talk is part of the seminar series hosted by by the Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE) at Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and sponsored by The Miner Foundation.

About the speaker

Cornelia Storz is Professor for the Study of Economic Institutions and East Asian Development at the University of Frankfurt, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, and affiliated to the Interdisciplinary Centre for East Asian Studies (IZO). She is associate researcher of the EHESS, Paris.

Her research focuses on comparative institutional analysis, innovation and industry emergence. With scholarships of JSPS, JILPT, BMBF and others she has been invited to the University of Tokyo, the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training, the RIETI at METI, the Hitotsubashi University, the Stanford Graduate Business School and others. She was granted research funds by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the Wolfgang Ritter Foundation, the Japan Foundation and others.

Recent papers have been published in Research Policy, ZfB and Social Science Japan Journal. She is co-editing a special section of Research Policy on “Path Dependence and Emergence of New Industries” and a special issue of Socio Economic Review on “Asian Capitalism” (both forthcoming). She is co-author of Institutional Diversity and Innovation. Continuing and Emerging Patterns in Japan and China  (Routledge, 2011) and co-editor of Institutional Variety in East Asia. Formal and informal patterns of coordination (Edward Elgar, 2011). She is co-organiser of the SASE network “Asian Capitalisms” and member of executive committee of the European Research Network EJARN, based at the Stockholm Schools of Economics.

Abstract
At the end of February 2012, the number of mobile subscribers topped 1 billion in China, an average of around four out of every five people, and this number never stops increasing. What are the consequences of such popularity of a communication technology in China, the largest authoritarian state in the world? Among many things, the ubiquity of mobile phones in China, as in other authoritarian states, dramatically changes the way people experience and cope with everyday communication activities, offering unprecedented opportunities for them to expose discontent, air grievances, and coordinate online/offline collective resistance—in short, nourishing changes in political culture and power structure.

My study explores how people appropriate and use their mobile phones to initiate, organize, and mobilize collective resistance and popular protests in contemporary China. Specifically, my presentation will focus on mobile phone rumor as an emerging form of public resistance at the grassroots level in contemporary China. By focusing on several concrete case studies with 80+ in-depth interviews, my study observes that the low-cost and user-friendly mobile device lowers the average protest threshold, creating an opportunity for people, especially those without complicated communication skills, to organize or participate in resistance. The mutual visibility of meta-communication through mobile network greatly increases both credibility of information and sense of security for participation. Additionally, the synchronous mobile communication accumulates rumor discourse into resistance in a very short time. As a kind of contentious politics, rumor communication via mobile phones shows the opposition to government censorship and control of communications, and most important, the resistance against the use of the accusation of “rumor” by authorities to stifle any different voices.

Finally, I will highlight that both the Party-state mass media and the Internet in China tend to focus our gaze too much on “public” communications flows and their related public sphere, ignoring invisible but relevant interpersonal communication as well as the fact that the motivation and actions of human beingsare rooted in the experiences of everyday life.

Jun Liu just finished his Ph.D. study at University of Copenhagen and is currentlya visiting researcher in Stanford University. His research interest covers the relationship between media, contemporary culture, and political and social change in China with particular attention to the importance of new media andcommunications technologies including the Internet and mobile phones. He has a Ph.D. in Chinese studies. He has articles published and forthcoming in several academic journals, including Modern Asian Studies and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

About the seminar

This talk will describe new research showing that bankruptcy law reforms affect the rate of founding by well-educated and older entrepreneurs and the performance of their ventures.

The seminar will show the results of a natural experiment in Japan where changes to bankruptcy laws reduced the consequences of closing a company to find that:

1. likelihood of bankruptcy increases, especially for firms founded by elite entrepreneurs
2. elite entrepreneurs form an increasing proportion of the new firms
3. new firm performance increases as these elite entrepreneurs are more likely to found higher performing firms.

While prior research emphasizes the lowering of entry barriers, our work suggests that reducing the "barriers to failure" can stimulate venture formation among elite individuals leading to higher performing firms. Overall, we find that legal reforms that reduce failure barriers encourage "better", not just 'more", entrepreneurs to found ventures.

This talk is part of the seminar series hosted by the Stanford Project on Japanese Entrepreneurship (STAJE) at Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneruship, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and sponsored by The Miner Foundation.

Abstract:

It has long been recognized that corruption and clientelism feed upon each other. However, how public malfeasance affects citizens' willingness to engage in patron-client relations remains unexplored. This article shows that perceptions, experiences, and information about political corruption influence a citizen's likelihood to sell his or her vote, and the types of gifts, favors, or public services he or she is willing to trade for it. The context of the article is Mexico's presidential and local elections. To circumvent methodological challenges posed by social desirability bias and reverse causation, the article presents evidence from a list experiment embedded in a national representative survey conducted close to the 2012 presidential election, and evidence from a field experiment conducted close to the 2009 municipal elections. I conclude that, given favorable circumstances, governmental corruption breeds forms of political behavior that are detrimental to the proper functioning of democracy, such as vote buying.

About the Speaker:

Ana L. De La O is assistant professor of Political Science at Yale University. She is affiliated with the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Institution of Social and Policy Studies, and the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Her research relates to the political economy of poverty alleviation, clientelism and the provision of public goods. She recently completed a book manuscript that explores the causes and political consequences of the proliferation of Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. She earned her PhD in Political Science from M.I.T.

This is co-sponsered with Stanford's Center for Africa Studies

Abstract:

Rural dwellers in the former homeland areas of South Africa are now increasingly defined as rightless subjects, as a result of the undemocratic rule of traditional leadership institutions, and despite the existence of South Africa's progressive post-apartheid Constitution adopted in 1996. Indeed, customary law and traditional institutions are recognised by the Constitution and are meaningful and of practical importance for many rural dwellers. Many rural dwellers have dexterously combined the idiom of custom and the discourse of the Constitution, rather than pitting the Constitution against custom. However, post-1994 traditional leadership laws are not built on such evolutionary hybridisation of the Constitution and custom. These laws stealthily vest significant powers in traditional leadership institutions in ways that potentially undermine rights and create tensions with the constitutionally recognised system and tiers of governance.

About the speaker:

Mazibuko Kanyiso Jara a 2012 Social Entrepreneurs-in-Residence at Stanford and a research associate at UCT Law, Race and Gender Research Unit examines the future of the underdeveloped rural areas in the former homelands, which are increasingly shaped by various conflicts and contradictions: between the Constitution and the official version of customary law; between custom and rights; between traditional councils and municipalities; between rural dwellers and tribal authorities; between rural women and patriarchal tribal institutions; and between imposed tribal institutions and local experiments with community-based systems.

When the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of 1991, the independent Republic of Kazakhstan was left with the world’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal and a huge nuclear infrastructure, including lots of fissile materials, several nuclear reactors, the Ulba Metallurgical Plant, and the enormous Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site. The return of the nuclear weapons to Russia (thanks to former Secretary of Defense William Perry), the transport of vulnerable highly-enriched uranium to the U.S. (Project Sapphire), the disposition of the fast reactor fuel, and upgrading of security and safeguards at its research reactors have been the subject of numerous reports. The story of what has been done with what the Soviets left behind at the test site and the dangers it presented will be the main topic of my presentation. It is a great story of how scientists from three countries worked together effectively among themselves and with their governments to deal with one of the greatest nuclear dangers in the post-Cold War era.

About the speaker: Siegfried S. Hecker is co-director of the Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, Senior Fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Professor (Research) in the Department of Management Science and Engineering. He also served as Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986-1997. Dr. Hecker’s research interests include plutonium science, nuclear weapon policy and international security, nuclear security (including nonproliferation and counter terrorism), and cooperative nuclear threat reduction. Over the past 20 years, he has fostered cooperation with the Russian nuclear laboratories to secure and safeguard the vast stockpile of ex-Soviet fissile materials. His current interests include the challenges of nuclear India, Pakistan, North Korea, the nuclear aspirations of Iran and the peaceful spread of nuclear energy in Central Asia and South Korea. Dr. Hecker has visited North Korea seven times since 2004, reporting back to U.S. government officials on North Korea’s nuclear progress and testifying in front of the U.S. Congress. He is a fellow of numerous professional societies and received the Presidential Enrico Fermi Award.