SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2023)

Friday, December 1, 2023 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Social Media and Government Responsiveness: Evidence from Vaccine Procurement in China

This research studies how public opinion on social media affected local governments' procurement of vaccines in China during 2014-2019. To establish causality, we exploit city-level variation in the eruption of online opinion on vaccine safety, instrumented by quasi-random early penetration of social media. We find that governments in cities exposed to stronger social media shocks increased the share of more transparent procurement and reduced home bias by procuring more vaccines from nonlocal producers. The effect is driven by posts expressing anti-government sentiment instead of posts containing investigative information and is larger in cities where local officials face higher top-down political pressure.

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

About the Speaker 
 

Yanhui Wu is an economist whose research concentrates on two areas: media economics and organizational economics. In media economics, he studies the political economy of mass media, particularly the underexplored subject of the media in China. In organizational economics, his research focuses on the organization of knowledge-intensive activities, particularly in the digital economy. Recently, he has worked with data scientists to develop new big data methods and apply them to the social sciences. His work has been published at top economics, management, and statistics journals, including the American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Management Science, Organization Science, and the Journal of American Statistical Association.

Yanhui Wu is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Hong Kong and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Finance and Business Economics at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics in 2011. Prior to his doctoral study, he was an award-winning financial journalist in China.
 

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
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2023)

Friday, November 17, 2023 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

How Digital Surveillance Justifies Massive Lockdowns in China During COVID-19
 

China’s draconian response to COVID-19 drew considerable criticism, with many suggesting that intense digital surveillance and harsh lockdowns triggered the unusual public dissent seen in China in late 2022. However, we argue that rather than backfiring, digital surveillance may have legitimized the government’s overreaction by making uncertain threats appear certain. We collected data on daily counts of lockdown communities and COVID cases from 2020 to 2023. Using a difference-in-differences approach with World Value Surveys (China 2012, 2018) and a nationwide online survey in 2023, we show that real-world lockdowns significantly reduced public perception of respect for human rights and trust in the government; however, these effects are moderated by the pervasiveness of COVID surveillance, proxied by cellphone usage. To establish causality, we use a survey experiment to show that digital surveillance indeed increases support for COVID lockdowns by making citizens more likely to believe they are close contacts. In contrast, surveillance cannot justify protest crackdowns. Our findings suggest that uncertainty in threats to public safety may foster support for state surveillance and coercion.

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

About the Speaker 
 

Xu Xu is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Xu studies digital authoritarianism, political repression, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on China. He is currently working on a book entitled Authoritarian Control in the Age of Digital Surveillance. His other ongoing projects examine the political aspects of artificial intelligence, social media propaganda, public opinion on state repression, and state-society relations in China. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, among other peer-reviewed journals.

He received his Ph.D. in political science from Pennsylvania State University in 2019, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University from 2020 to 2021.
 

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
 

SCCEI Fall Seminar Series 

Friday, October 27, 2023 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Improving Regulation for Innovation: Evidence from China’s Pharmaceutical Industry

This study investigates the extent to which improved regulation can foster innovation by analyzing the impact of a major regulatory reform implemented in 2015 on the quantity and quality of innovation in China's pharmaceutical industry. Inspired by regulatory practices in the US, the reform aimed to address application backlogs and reduce administrative waiting time for new drug development. Using data at the drug and firm levels, we uncover three main findings: (1) drug categories experiencing improved approval times witnessed a surge in investigational new drug applications; (2) while there existed little improvement in within-drug innovation quality, the reform stimulated shifts in firm composition, leading to the influx of innovative new firm and enhancing aggregate-level drug innovativeness; and (3) the market recognized the improvement in drug innovation, evidenced by changes in stock prices following new drug registrations. Our findings highlight the important relationship between innovation quantity and quality, influenced by firm composition. They also suggest that emerging markets can enhance their innovation potential by adopting regulatory approaches akin to frontier countries.

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

About the Speaker 
 

Ruixue Jia is an Associate Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego. Her research interests lie at the intersection of economics, history, and politics. One area of her research examines elite formation and its influence, both in historical and contemporary contexts. Another focus of her work is uncovering the deep historical origins of economic development. In recent years, she has studied the ongoing transformation of China's manufacturing sector and expanded her research to encompass labor and technology-related issues.

Jia is affiliated with BREAD, CESifo, CEPR, and NBER. She also serves as the co-director of UCSD's China Data Lab, which aims to lead China studies into a new era where contextual knowledge is tested and corroborated by social science methods and data.

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
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2023)

Friday, October 13, 2023 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Quid Pro Quo, Knowledge Spillover, and Industrial Quality Upgrading: Evidence from the Chinese Auto Industry

This paper studies the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) via quid pro quo (technology for market access) in facilitating knowledge spillover and quality upgrades. Our context is the Chinese automobile industry, where foreign automakers are required to set up joint ventures (the quid) with domestic automakers in return for market access (the quo). The identification strategy exploits a unique dataset of detailed vehicle quality measures along multiple dimensions and relies on within-product quality variation across dimensions. We show that affiliated domestic automakers, compared to their nonaffiliated counterparts, adopt more similar quality strengths of their joint venture partners. Quid pro quo generates knowledge spillover to affiliated domestic automakers in addition to any industry-wide spillover. We rule out alternative explanations involving endogenous joint venture network formation, overlapping customer bases, or direct technology transfer via market transactions. Analyses leveraging additional micro datasets on worker flows and upstream suppliers demonstrate that labor mobility and supplier networks are important channels mediating knowledge spillover. Finally, we estimate an equilibrium model for the auto industry and quantify the impact of quid-pro-quo-induced  quality upgrading on domestic sales and profits. Quid pro quo improved the quality of affiliated domestic models by 3.8-12.7% and raised their sales (profit) by 0.9-3.9% (1.02-3.49%) relative to unrestricted FDI.

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

About the Speaker 
 

Jie Bai is an Assistant Professor in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Her research lies at the intersection between development, trade and industrial organization, focusing on microeconomic issues of firms in developing countries and emerging markets. Her past projects have examined firms’ incentive and ability to build a reputation for quality, collective reputational forces in export markets, the relationship between firm growth and corruption, and the impact of internal trade barriers among Chinese provinces on firms' export behavior. Her current ongoing work includes studying growth and reputation dynamics in online markets, technology transfer and knowledge spillovers among firms, and quality incentives and upgrading along supply chains. Professor Bai received her Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 2016 and spent one year at Microsoft Research New England prior to joining Harvard Kennedy School.

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
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2023)

Friday, September 29, 2023 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

From Kins to Comrades: Rural Clan Society and the Rise of Communism in China

A key paradox of social revolutions is that despite their radical, modernist claims, success often requires effective mobilization of the peasantry, who are typically conservative and inward-looking. This article studies how traditional institutions of rural society can help movement entrepreneurs mobilize a modern revolution. Using newly digitized data on over 54,000 family genealogies and 500,000 revolutionary martyrs from 637 uprisings nationwide, we examine the role of clan and kinship networks during the incipient stage of the Chinese Communist Revolution (1927--1936). Triple-difference estimates suggest that local organizers mobilized significantly more co-clan members to join uprisings than non-co-clans. Furthermore, we provide evidence that the characteristics of organizers’ clans and the local clan structure are among the most decisive factors in predicting uprising occurrence and outcome. These findings highlight the subtle yet significant linkage between agrarian institutions and modern revolutions and offer a new perspective on the origin of Chinese communism.

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

About the Speaker  
 

Junyan Jiang is the Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Professor Jiang studies comparative politics and political economy, focusing on the politics of elites, organizations, and ideas. Some of his current research projects explore the formation and transformation of political elite networks in China, the interplay between formal rules and informal power in bureaucratic systems, and the dynamics of ideology in changing societies. His work has been published in American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Development Economics, and World Politics, among others. He has received the 2020 Gregory Luebbert Article Award for the best article in comparative politics from the American Political Science Association (APSA), and honorable mentions for the 2016 Sage Paper Award for the best paper presented at APSA Annual Meetings and the 2018 Mancur Olson Award for the best dissertation in political economy.

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
 

What's next for Korean democracy? How can Korea advance the next state of its develoment? APARC and Korea Program director Gi-Wook Shin addresses these and other questions in his new book, The Adventure of Democracy.

Available in Korea on June 15, this publication is compilation of Shin's recent essays, Shin's Reflections on Korea, presenting a road map for realizing the vision of a "Next Korea" across the realms of politics, economics, society, culture, and foreign policy.

If you find yourself in Seoul, we invite you to join Professor Shin for an engaging book talk that will delve into the pressing questions surrounding Korean democracy.

Discussants:

Shin-wha Lee, Professor of Political Science, Korea University; Ambassador of International Cooperation on North Korean Human Rights, Republic of Korea

Tae Gyun Park, Professor of Korean Studies, Graduate School of International Studies, Seoul National University

Sang-hun Choe, New York Times Seoul Bureau

The discussion is moderated by Ho-ki Kim, professor of sociology at Yonsei University.

Co-sponsored by Peking University Institute for Global Health and Development, and the Asia Health Policy Program

July 11th, 5-6 pm PST; July 12th, 2023, 8-9 am Beijing Time

Scientific evidence documents an ongoing mass extinction of species, caused by human activity. Allocating conservation resources is difficult due to scarce evidence on the damages from losing specific species. This paper studies the collapse of vultures in India, triggered by the expiry of a patent on a painkiller. Our results suggest the functional extinction of vultures --- efficient scavengers who removed carcasses from the environment --- increased human mortality by over 4% because of a large negative shock to sanitation. These effects are comparable to estimates of heat deaths from climate change. We quantify damages at $69.4 billion per-year.

Image

Eyal Frank is an Assistant Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy and the Energy Policy Institute (EPIC) at the University of Chicago. He works at the intersection of economics and conservation, addressing three broad questions: (i) how do natural inputs, namely animals, contribute to different production functions of interest, (ii) how do market dynamics reduce natural habitats and lead to declining wildlife population levels, and (iii) what are the costs, indirect ones in particular, of conservation policies. To overcome causal inference challenges—as manipulating ecosystems and species at large scales is often infeasible—his work draws on natural experiments from ecology and policy, and uses econometric techniques to advance our understanding regarding the social cost of biodiversity losses.

Zoom Meeting:
Meeting ID: 849 6673 1656
Passcode: 110194

About the Event: Nuclear-armed states–including Russia and China–have sought to secure their nuclear arsenals from preemptive attack by deploying mobile ground-launched missiles. However, a spate of technological developments remote-sensing technologies has spurred a debate about whether nuclear arsenals will remain survivable. Current scholarship implicitly assumes that mobile missiles will be operated sub-optimally, vastly underestimating the difficulty of tracking mobile missiles and hence their survivability. In this paper, I introduce a qualitative model of tracking and use it to analyze how a set of remote sensing technologies, including space-based radar, could be used in concert to attempt to track mobile missiles. Using this model, I show that mobile missiles can be easily made survivable today using simple operational countermeasures. I then show how technological countermeasures, some of which are already deployed today, could allow mobile missiles to remain survivable into the near future, even as remote sensing capabilities continue to develop.

About the Speaker: Thomas MacDonald is a fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has an interdisciplinary scientific background which he applies to interesting technical problems which are interwoven with political concerns. His current research focuses on the verification of nuclear arms control and nonproliferation agreements. This work is along two tracks, developing verifiable and feasible arms control proposals to revitalize a flagging arms control establishment, and researching probabilistic methods to find novel approaches to stubborn arms control challenges.

He completed his PhD in nuclear science and engineering at MIT. His dissertation work studied the national security implications of advancing and emerging technologies, specifically remote sensing technologies used to track mobile missiles carrying nuclear weapons. He also completed a MSc in pharmaceutical sciences from the University of Toronto where he synthesized nanoparticles for detecting and treating cancer, and holds a BSc in biochemistry from the University of Waterloo.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

Co-sponsored by Peking University Institute for Global Health and Development, and the Asia Health Policy Program

Child marriage remains common even where female schooling and employment opportunities have grown. We experimentally evaluate a financial incentive to delay marriage alongside a girls’ empowerment program in Bangladesh. While girls eligible for two years of incentive are 19% less likely to marry underage, the empowerment program failed to decrease adolescent marriage. We show that these results are consistent with a signaling model in which bride type is imperfectly observed but preferred bride types (socially conservative girls) have lower returns to delaying marriage. Consistent with our theoretical prediction, we observe substantial spillovers of the incentive on untreated non-preferred types.

Image

Erica Field is a Professor of Economics and Global Health at Duke University specializing in the fields of Development Economics, Health Economics and Economic Demography. Professor Field’s work examines the microeconomics of household poverty and health in developing countries, with an emphasis on the study of gender and development. She has written papers on several topics in development in many different parts of the world, including microfinance contract design and social networks in India, marriage markets in Bangladesh, micronutrient deficiencies in Tanzania, health insurance for the poor in Nicaragua, household bargaining over fertility in Zambia.  Her work has been published in several leading peer-reviewed journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy and the American Economic Journal. Professor Field received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2003. Prior to joining the Economics Department at Duke, she was a John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Economics at Harvard University. 

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85156177922?pwd=RzFaKzlMVUdleVF2N0M3YUFBd3ZlZz09
Meeting ID: 851 5617 7922
Passcode: 410360