Mireille Jacobson, PhD, is an associate professor at the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. She is an applied micro-economist with a diverse portfolio of research united by an interest in understanding how health care policies and incentives in health care markets affect well-being.

Title: Price Sensitivity and Information Barriers to the Take-up of Naloxone (Joint with David Power of RAND)

Abstract: We conducted a field experiment that randomized advertisements, advertisement content, and sales price across 2,204counties in the United States to study the impacts on online purchases of naloxone, an opioid overdose reversal drug. Advertising increased website visits but only impacted purchases when combined with a price reduction. Messages emphasizing the discreet nature of online sales had no additional impact on purchases. Comparing counties with advertisements featuring a highly discounted price to those featuring the full price, we estimate a price elasticity of demand for online naloxone of -0.78. Price is a significant barrier to online purchases of this life-saving medication.

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

Pakistan followed the example of many large Asian countries and started introducing publicly financed health insurance under the so-called "Sehat Sahulat Program" (SSP) from 2015 onwards. The SSP initially covered hospitalization expenses for poor households in selected districts and by now covers millions of households all over Pakistan. This talk explains the recent reforms, focusing on information barriers to utilizing the SSP. In particular awareness about coverage seems to be a key issue, making the system not easy to navigate for poor households. A first study shows that education plays an important role for successfully utilizing health care under the scheme in this context. Information and awareness about financial protection, however, is only one element of health care decisions. Even if beneficiaries know which household members are covered under which condition in which facility, they might still be unsure about where treatment is most appropriate given their medical condition. A second study thus provides theoretical and empirical evidence on how incomplete financial and medical information jointly affect health provider choices, and how this might explain limited health service utilization under the SSP.

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Andreas Landmann is a Full Professor of Development Economics at the Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) Erlangen-Nürnberg where he uses applied econometrics and behavioral research in the area of development economics. A lot of his work investigates insurance in low-income countries, with a special focus on health. In particular, he analyzes different impact evaluations on health insurance provision in Pakistan. Additionally, he is interested in decisions under risk and uncertainty, as well as prosocial preferences. He conducted several large-scale impact evaluations, randomized control trials, and behavioral experiments in the Philippines, Germany, Vietnam, China, and Pakistan, all of them including primary data collection. Prior to joining the FAU, he held research positions at the University of Göttingen, the Paris School of Economics, and the University of Mannheim, from where he also holds a PhD.

SCCEI Spring Seminar Series 

Wednesday, May 24, 2023 | 11:00 am -12:15 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Winning Hearts, Minds and Taste Buds? Telling the China Story Using Public Diplomacy 
 

China is becoming the first country since the USSR that could challenge the US-dominated world order and the state has spent a huge amount on public diplomacy to influence global opinions. A main goal of China’s public diplomacy efforts is to “tell the China story” well. We examine how “telling the China story” does in the Global South by examining the state-sponsored educational programs which enroll students from the Global South in Chinese universities. One aim is to nurture the next generation of political and business elites who would develop positive attitudes toward the Chinese economic and governance models. We detail China’s public diplomacy effort in this area and evaluate its impact on attitudes toward China’s economic and governance models using original surveys, interviews and generative AI language models' outputs. We further identify policy implications against the backdrop of the ongoing US-China competition.

About the Speaker  
 

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Yue Hou is the Janice and Julian Bers Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. This year she is a visiting scholar at  Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions (SCCEI). Yue Hou's research centers on the political economy of non-democracies with a regional focus on China. Yue Hou's research interests include how individual actors (e.g., citizens, firms) interact with the state and state agents that are not held accountable by elections, and how these interactions affect outcomes such as economic growth, government service, quality of institutions, and policy changes. 

Seminar Series Moderators 
 

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Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and the co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University.  For the past 30 years, he has worked on the economics of poverty reduction. Currently, his work on poverty has its full focus on human capital, including issues of rural health, nutrition and education. For the past 20 year, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Most recently, Rozelle's research focuses on the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition in China. In recognition of this work, Dr. Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards. Among them, he became a Yangtse Scholar (Changjiang Xuezhe) in Renmin University of China in 2008. In 2008 he also was awarded the Friendship Award by Premiere Wen Jiabao, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a foreigner. 
 

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Hongbin Li is the Co-director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions, and a Senior Fellow of Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Hongbin obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2001 and joined the economics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he became full professor in 2007. He was also one of the two founding directors of the Institute of Economics and Finance at the CUHK. He taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing 2007-2016 and was C.V. Starr Chair Professor of Economics in the School of Economics and Management. He founded the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) in 2009 and the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) in 2014.

Hongbin’s research has been focused on the transition and development of the Chinese economy, and the evidence-based research results have been both widely covered by media outlets and well read by policy makers around the world. He is currently the co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics.

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 Garrette Grothe at gtgrothe@stanford.edu

690 million people. 11 countries.  A $3 trillion-plus GDP.  Southeast Asia is a critical region of growing strategic and economic importance. Yet in the United States it does not receive the attention and study it deserves.  Ambassador Scot Marciel, who spent the bulk of his 35-year diplomatic career working in and on the region, has written an essential new book – “Imperfect Partners:  The United States and Southeast Asia” – that combines extensive research and his first-hand experience to explore the ups and downs in U.S. relations with key partners in the region over the past 30-40 years.  The book offers practical, timely recommendations on how to strengthen U.S.-Southeast Asian ties in this new era of U.S.-China competition.

Please join APARC’s Southeast Asia Program for Ambassador Marciel’s conversation with Program Director Professor Don Emmerson.  Ambassador Marciel will discuss how and why U.S.-Southeast Asian relations have brought both benefits and disappointments on both sides of the Pacific.  He will argue that the U.S. can best advance its strategic interests by engaging the region on its own substantial merits rather than viewing it through a lens focused on China. 

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Ambassador Scot Marciel is the Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow at Stanford University’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.  He retired from the U.S. State Department in April 2022 after a 37-year career that included assignments as the first U.S. Ambassador to ASEAN, Ambassador to Indonesia and to Myanmar, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific.  He witnessed the Philippine People Power revolt as a junior foreign service officer in Manila and was the first U.S. diplomat to serve in Hanoi after the Vietnam War.

About the Event: Systemic risks derive from a mix of economic, technological, socio political, and ecological factors. Inherently interdisciplinary, the study of systemic risk draws on financial shock models, operations research, global health, foresight, management, military strategy, risk assessment, risk sociology, disaster research, security studies, science and technology studies, existential risk research, as well as the AI risk and biorisk communities. Pulling together core insights from those fields, the talk presents the argument that even mid-range (meso level) risks may become systemic, and so might contribute to catastrophic or even existential outcomes, depending on the order and magnitude of the interaction effects between them. However, the study of systemic risk requires developing transdisciplinary tools that can better integrate the insights drawn from these disparate fields despite high uncertainty. Nevertheless, apart from a tiny literature on risk assessment of rare events (black/grey swans), and embryonic efforts at the the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) at a high level of abstraction, there is still no overarching framework specifically formulated for systemic risks beyond economics.

This talk seeks to promote the integrated study of systemic risk by offering a snapshot of five risk scenarios for 2075 (in video format), a custom-created board game, a transdisciplinary approach, conceptual clarifications, risk factor identification heuristics, and early results from an ongoing survey. The talk includes a novel attempt to structure and visualize systemic risk factors. It also sketches a notation that enables a simple way to annotate relationships between systemic risks and the cascading effects and relationships between them. Lastly, the case is made that we need a dual notation (scientific and lay) for any scenario models used in scientific results meant to also be consumed by the public.

About the Speaker: Dr. Trond Arne Undheim (see his Stanford profile), Ph.D is a Research Scholar in Global Systemic Risk, Innovation, and Policy at the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative (SERI) at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford. He leads a research project on Global Systemic Risk Scenarios for 2075, addressing the fact that humanity faces a myriad of existential risks of technological, sociopolitical, and ecological origin. The project involves developing a set of audiovisual scenarios, quantitative online surveys, technology reviews (generative AI, immersive AR/VR, quantum tech, synthetic biology platforms), and regional case studies (Nigeria, Mexico, USA, Scandinavia, India). He is also developing a framework to analyze cascading risks, assembling a set of risk factors and associated mitigation strategies, which is intended as a resource towards transdisciplinary collaboration. At Stanford, he teaches STS 156 The Future Of Global Systemic Risk (EARTHSYS 156, SOC 128) and is working on a 2024 course (STS X) tentatively called From Regenerative Entrepreneurship to Giga Projects. His next book, Eco Tech: Investing in Regenerative Futures comes out in the fall and will be on pre-order starting Aug 2, 2023 from Routledge.

Trond Arne Undheim is a futurist, scholar, podcaster, and venture partner and an expert on the evolution of technology and society. He is a Research Scholar in Global Systemic Risk, Innovation, and Policy at the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative (SERI) at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), Stanford University. He is also a venture partner at Antler, and a co-founder of technology foresight consulting firm Yegii. Formerly with Tulip Interfaces, Hitachi Ventures, MIT, WPP, Oracle, and the EU, he’s a co-author (with Natan Linder) of Augmented Lean (Wiley 2022), and is the author of Health Tech (Routledge 2021), Future Tech (Kogan Page 2021), Pandemic Aftermath (Atmosphere Press 2020), Disruption Games (Atmosphere Press 2020), and Leadership From Below (Lulu Press 2008). In addition, he hosts the Futurized podcast, and is a Forbes columnist. Trond's work has featured in a variety of business, industrial, and mainstream media, including in The Boston Globe, NPR's Cognoscenti, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, IndustryWeek, and MIT News. He holds a Ph.D. on the future of work and artificial intelligence. 

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

About the Event: The U.S. Foreign Service faces one of the most difficult times in its history while dealing with a growing array of challenges around the world. In order to more effectively advance U.S. political, economic and security interests in a time of rapid change, America’s diplomats require additional resources, better training and stronger leadership.

Ambassadors Marc Grossman and Marcie B. Ries, working with a team of career diplomats on the American Diplomacy Project, have produced blueprints for modernizing the U.S. diplomatic service, focusing on four key areas:  a renewed and revised mission and mandate for America’s diplomats; expanded opportunities for professional education and training; a modernized and more flexible personnel system; and a Diplomatic Reserve Corps. 

Ambassadors Grossman and Ries will discuss this important report and its key recommendations on Wednesday, March 29 from 10:00-11:15 am in the Perry Conference Room at Encina Hall at Stanford University.

About the Speakers:

Ambassador Marc Grossman served as the under secretary of state for political affairs, the State Department's third highest position, until his retirement in 2005 after 29 years in the Foreign Service.  As under secretary, he helped marshal diplomatic support for the international response to the September 11 attacks.  He also managed U.S. policies in the Balkans and Colombia and promoted a key expansion of the NATO alliance.  As assistant secretary of state for European affairs, he helped direct NATO's military campaign in Kosovo and an earlier round of NATO expansion.  Ambassador Grossman served as the U.S. ambassador to Turkey 1994–1997.

Ambassador Marcie B. Ries retired after more than 35 years of diplomatic experience in Europe, the Caribbean and the Middle East.  She is a three-time chief of mission, serving as head of the U.S. mission in Kosovo (2003–2004), U.S. ambassador to Albania (2004–2007) and U.S. ambassador to Bulgaria (2012–2015).  She also played a key role in the negotiation of the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

 All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.