SCCEI Spring Seminar Series 

Wednesday, May 10, 2023 | 11:00 am -12:15 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Conflicting Institutional Pressures and Corporate Digital Transformation in China 
 

Digital transformation has become a national policy in many countries. We examine in a centralized political system, how conflicting institutional pressures can affect corporate engagement in digital transformation of core manufacturing system. Given that a key benefit and consequence of digitalization is the replacement of low-skill labor, we propose that high pressure from unemployment can reduce the impact of proactive digital policies. Moreover, under high unemployment pressure, the government is likely to target firms that are less likely to lay off employees for digital transformation. As a result, ironically, firms that can potentially benefit more from digital transformation are less likely to digitalize. We test our argument with a sample of publicly listed manufacturing firms in China, and found strong support. Our study reveals decoupling in government action as well as in firm response, and contributes to a better understanding about the state influence on firms’ digital technologies in China.

About the Speaker  
    

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Rose Luo is the Rudolf and Valeria Maag Professor in Entrepreneurship and Family Business. She is Academic Director of the top-ranked Tsinghua-INSEAD dual-degree EMBA program and Department Chair of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD. Before INSEAD, she served as a tenured faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for 9 years. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology with a focus on organizational studies from Stanford University. Her research examines organizational responses to institutional pressures, corporate strategies in emerging markets, and family businesses. She has published numerous research studies in leading academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, and Strategic Management Journal, and serves as editorial board members in the journals.

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.

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Questions? Contact Garrette Grothe at gtgrothe@stanford.edu

CDDRL's Fisher Family Honors Program trains students from any academic department at Stanford to prepare them to write a policy-relevant research thesis with global impact on a subject touching on democracy, development, and the rule of law. For our final Spring 2023 seminar, please join us to hear our Honors Program award winners present their research.

SPEAKERS TO BE ANNOUNCED 
 

• Firestone Medal Winner
• CDDRL Outstanding Thesis Winner

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

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Why do super-wealthy business owners in developing democracies engage in politics? Is corporate political activity fundamentally “defensive” or “offensive” in nature?

Using an original longitudinal dataset of 177 Ukrainian oligarchs, this paper investigates the reasons for (and the ramifications of) tycoons’ political activity. The analysis differentiates between political and economic vulnerabilities — as well as capabilities — of the oligarchs as antecedents for their political strategy. I also investigate how asset specificity of oligarchs’ portfolios, as well as their media ownership and foreign holdings, mitigate the results. Theoretical implications are drawn for our understanding of state-business relations in emerging democracies lacking the rule of law.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Stan Markus is an Associate Professor of International Business at the University of South Carolina and an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard. He received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Markus works on state-business relations and is broadly interested in the political economy of development. His projects explore property rights protection, oligarchs, corporate social responsibility, lobbying, corruption, state capacity, and institution building.

His book — Property, Predation, and Protection: Piranha Capitalism in Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge University Press, 2015) — was awarded the Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research. His research has also been published in the leading peer-reviewed journals in management (e.g. Academy of Management Review), political science (e.g. Comparative Political Studies), development studies (e.g. Studies in Comparative International Development), economic sociology (e.g. Socio-Economic Review), and general interest (e.g. Daedalus). It has also been recognized through many awards, including the Wilson Center Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in D.C.; the Harvard Academy Fellowship from the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies; the Jean Monnet Fellowship from the European University Institute; the Academy of Management Best Paper Award; and the Best Article in Comparative Politics Award from APSA.

Markus's commentary has been featured in media outlets, including CNN, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, CNBC, NPR, Vox, and Voice of America, among others.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran – the two preeminent centers of Twelver Shi‘ite legal education and learning in the world – are typically described as being in competition with one another for ideological influence and to host the most widely followed ayatollahs.

This talk offers a different interpretation of Shi‘ite religious authority. The relationship between Najaf and Qom is analyzed as a duopoly, a market structure in which two interdependent firms dominate. These seminaries compete to prevent either from monopolizing Shi‘ite religious authority. But they also collude to 1) protect their market share by preventing the emergence of rival centers, and 2) preserve Shi‘ite clerics’ exclusive authority to extract religious rents from believers by suppressing doctrinal and popular movements that might challenge the Usuli school that dominates Twelver Shi‘ism today. This collusive behavior in the religious marketplace stifles innovation and explains why no Shi‘ite version of salafism has developed.

This talk is hosted in partnership with CDDRL's Program on Arab Reform and Democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

David Siddhartha Patel is a senior fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. His research focuses on religious authority, social order, identity, and state-building in the contemporary Middle East. His first book, Order Out of Chaos: Islam, Information, and the Rise and Fall of Social Orders in Iraq (Cornell University Press), examines the role of mosques and clerical networks in generating order after state collapse and is based upon independent field research he conducted in Basra. Patel’s second book project, Defunct States of the Middle East, chronicles the more than two dozen territorial polities that disappeared from the map of the region after 1918: how they came to be, how they died, and how they are remembered today. Patel has also published articles or chapters on the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood; ISIS; Iraqi politics; and the transnational spread of protests during the Arab Uprisings. Before joining the Crown Center, Patel was an assistant professor of government at Cornell University. Patel holds a BA in economics and political science from Duke University and a PhD in political science from Stanford University.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Nora Fisher-Onar will present an original and timely key to (Turkey’s) politics as driven not by any perineal conflict between “Islamist vs. secularist,” “Turk vs. Kurd,” or “Sunni vs. Alevi.” Rather, she argues, the driving force of political contestation is shifting coalitions of moderates across camps who seek to pluralize public life, versus coalitions of those who champion ethno- and ethno-religious nationalism. Using the key to retell Turkey’s political history from the late Ottoman empire through to the present, she concludes with insights for coalition dynamics today. The talk emanates from her book, Contesting Pluralism(s): Islam, Liberalism, and Nationalism in Turkey and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

This talk is hosted in partnership with CDDRL's Program on Turkey.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Nora Fisher-Onar is Associate Professor and Director of the Masters of Arts in International Studies at the University of San Francisco, as well as coordinator of Middle East Studies. Her research interests include IR and social theory, comparative politics (Turkey, Middle East, Europe), foreign policy analysis, political ideologies, gender, and history/memory.

She received a doctorate in IR from Oxford and holds master's and undergraduate degrees in international affairs from Johns Hopkins (SAIS) and Georgetown universities, respectively.

Fisher-Onar is the lead editor of the volume, Istanbul: Living With Difference in a Global City (Rutgers University Press, 2018) and author of Contesting Pluralism(s): Islam, Liberalism and Nationalism in Turkey (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

She has published extensively in academic journals like the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS), Conflict and Cooperation, Global Studies Quarterly, Millennium, Theory and Society, Women’s Studies International Forum, and Turkish Studies.

Fisher-Onar also contributes policy commentary to platforms like the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, the Guardian, and OpenDemocracy, and fora like Brookings, Carnegie, and the German Marshall Fund (GMF). At the GMF, she has served as a Ronald Asmus Fellow, a Transatlantic Academy Fellow, and a Non-Residential Fellow.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Deep partisan conflict in the mass public threatens the stability of American democracy. We conducted a megastudy of American partisans (n = 32,059) testing 25 interventions designed by academics and practitioners to reduce partisan animosity and anti-democratic attitudes.

We find that nearly every intervention reduced partisan animosity, most strongly when highlighting sympathetic outparty exemplars. In contrast to concerns about the intractability of anti-democratic attitudes, we also identify interventions that successfully reduced support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence, most strongly when correcting misperceptions of the views of outpartisans. Furthermore, factor analysis and patterns of intervention effect sizes provide convergent evidence for limited overlap between these sets of outcomes, suggesting that, contrary to popular belief, distinct psychologies underlie partisan animosity versus support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence. Taken together, our findings provide a toolkit of promising strategies for practitioners and shed new theoretical light on challenges facing American democracy.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Robb Willer is a professor of sociology, psychology (by courtesy), and organizational behavior (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He is the director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab and the co-Director of the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

In 1985, James A. Baker III's “Program for Sustained Growth” proposed a set of economic policy reforms, including inflation stabilization, trade liberalization, greater openness to foreign investment, and privatization, that he believed would lead to faster growth in countries then known as the Third World, but now categorized as emerging and developing economies (EMDEs).

A country-specific, time-series assessment of the reform process reveals three clear facts. First, in the 10-year-period after stabilizing high inflation, the average growth rate of real GDP in EMDEs is 2.6 percentage points higher than in the prior ten-year period. Second, the corresponding growth increase for trade liberalization episodes is 2.66 percentage points. Third, in the decade after opening their capital markets to foreign equity investment, the spread between EMDEs average cost of equity capital and that of the US declines by 240 basis points. The three central facts of reform provide empirical support for the Baker Hypothesis.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Peter Blair Henry is the Class of 1984 Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and dean emeritus of New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. The youngest person ever named to the Stern Deanship, Henry has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in the flagship journals of economics and finance, as well as a book on global economic policy, Turnaround: Third World Lessons for First World Growth (Basic Books).

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

It’s almost impossible to sue a foreign government in U.S. courts. The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, the court-created “act of state” doctrine, and other common-law immunities shield foreign officials and governments from most lawsuits. For instance, courts have dismissed claims against China, Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia over allegations of torture, detentions, and election interference. Yet foreign governments have unfettered access to U.S. courts as plaintiffs. And foreign dictatorships—including Russia, China, Turkey, and Venezuela—have leveraged this access to harass political dissidents, critics, and even newspapers in the United States. These doctrines create an asymmetry at the heart of this Article: foreign dictators and their proxies can access our courts as plaintiffs to harass their opponents, but their regimes are, in turn, immune from lawsuits here.

This seminar will expose that asymmetry and argue that U.S. courts and Congress should make it harder for foreign dictators to abuse our legal system. This seminar offers three novel contributions. First, this seminar provides the first systematic assessment of foreign dictatorships in U.S. courts. While much of the literature is siloed by area of substantive law—focusing on contexts like human rights or property expropriations—this seminar treats dictators as a transsubstantive category of litigants, worthy of special analysis. Second, this seminar exposes how foreign dictators are increasingly taking advantage of U.S. courts and comity doctrines, especially as plaintiffs. In a misguided effort to promote harmonious foreign relations, courts have provided foreign dictators an array of protections and privileges, which dicta- tors are eagerly exploiting. Finally, this seminar demonstrates that there is no historical, constitutional, or statutory obligation on U.S. courts to give foreign dictators these legal protections and unfettered access to our courts. Because of that, I offer four concrete proposals to both stymie dictators’ access to U.S. courts as plaintiffs—through a proposed foreign sovereign anti-SLAPP statute—and weaken the protections that dictators enjoy as defendants. Simply stated, U.S. courts should not be instruments of foreign authoritarian oppression.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Diego A. Zambrano’s primary research and teaching interests lie in the areas of civil procedure, transnational litigation, and judicial federalism. His work explores the civil litigation landscape: the institutions, norms, and incentives that influence litigant and judicial behavior. Professor Zambrano also has an interest in comparative constitutional law and legal developments related to Venezuela. He currently leads an innovative Stanford Policy Lab tracking “Global Judicial Reforms” and has served as an advisor to pro-democracy political parties in Venezuela. In 2021, Professor Zambrano received the Barbara Allen Babcock Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Professor Zambrano’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming at the Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Virginia Law Review, among other journals, and has been honored by the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) and the National Civil Justice Institute. Professor Zambrano will be a co-author of the leading casebook Civil Procedure: A Modern Approach (8th ed. 2024) (with Marcus, Pfander, and Redish). In addition, Professor Zambrano serves as the current chair of the Federal Courts Section of the AALS. He also writes about legal issues for broader public audiences, with his contributions appearing in the Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and Lawfare.

After graduating with honors from Harvard Law School in 2013, Professor Zambrano spent three years as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb in New York, focusing on transnational litigation and arbitration. Before joining Stanford Law School in 2018, Professor Zambrano was a Bigelow Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.

Research on remedies for affective polarization has primarily focused on psychological interventions, and limited studies consider how state institutions might depolarize voters. I argue that compulsory military service—a central state institution—can depolarize voters because it prevents early partisan sorting and increases the likelihood of contact between partisans during their impressionable years.

Leveraging the staggered abolition of mandatory conscription laws in fifteen European countries and employing a regression discontinuity design, I show that men exempt from mandatory conscription report higher levels of affective polarization than men who were subject to mass conscription. This effect is mainly driven by partisan parochialism among men exempt from service and is unrelated to ideological change. My findings emphasize the potential depolarizing effects of state institutions and illustrate how the abolition of mandatory service contributed to intensified patterns of affective polarization in Europe, contributing to the literature on the institutional origins of affective polarization.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Chagai M. Weiss is a postdoctoral fellow at the Conflict and Polarization Initiative at the King Center on Global Development at Stanford University. After spending two years as a research fellow at Harvard University's Middle East Initiative, Chagai received a Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Chagai's primary interest is in understanding the potential role of institutions in reducing prejudice and conflict in divided societies. Chagai's work has been published or is forthcoming in multiple venues, including Cambridge University Press (Elements in Experimental Political Science), the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, and Comparative Political Studies.

Virtual to Public. Only those with an active Stanford ID with access to E008 in Encina Hall may attend in person.