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At the end of 2021 China Evergrande Group—one of China’s biggest property developers—finally defaulted on its bonds. The default didn’t spark a Lehman Moment—as widely prophesied—or any significant market upheaval, but it’s increasingly clear that Evergrande’s problems mark the start of a momentous shift in how China’s economy grows. Over the past 18 months, Beijing has induced a slowdown of the property sector with the goal of better ensuring financial sector stability and the sustainability of property sector growth. However, it has resulted in defaults, restructuring, and consolidation among China’s largest developers, and has implication for local government finance and the pace of economic growth. This talk will discuss the challenges posed by Evergrande’s decline and imminent restructuring, what Beijing is trying to achieve by reining in the property sector, and what risks are involved.

 

Dinny McMahon is the author of “China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle,” a ground up look at the mechanics of China’s political economy, which he wrote while a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars. He later moved to MacroPolo, the Paulson Institute’s think tank in Chicago, where he researched China’s efforts to clean up its financial system. Dinny started his career as a financial journalist in China, spending six years in Beijing with The Wall Street Journal, and four years with Dow Jones Newswires in Shanghai, where he also contributed to the Far Eastern Economic Review. Dinny is currently working on a project for the Wilson Center on China’s efforts to reduce its reliance on the US dollar. He also provides independent research on China’s financial system for financial services firms.

 

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This event is part of the 2022 Winter webinar series, The Future of China's Economy, sponsored by the APARC China Program.

 

Join us  Tuesday, December 7th from 12 PM - 1 PM PST for “Media Choices, Niche Behavior, and Biases in Online Information” featuring Sandra González-Bailón, Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania. This seminar series is organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.  

The quality of our democracies relies on the quality of the information that citizens consume but we still know very little about how citizens engage with the news “in the wild”. In this talk, I will discuss two papers that examine that question in different settings. The first paper analyzes the media choices of a representative panel of the U.S. population (N ~ 55,000) as they consume TV, web, and YouTube content over a period of 44 months. Less than 10% of the panelists (N ~ 5,300) view and browse news on the three platforms. This small group of news hyper-consumers is formed predominantly by older male users with higher education. We find no evidence of substitution effects in the time these users spend consuming news on each of the three platforms, but consuming news across the media landscape is a choice that only a small and unrepresentative slice of the population makes. These results help us characterize the digital equivalent of the ‘opinion leaders’ first proposed to understand the effects of mass media. The hyper-consumers we identify in our analyses create the elite of opinion leaders that have a disproportionate influence in how news content is selected, circulated, and (ultimately) algorithmically amplified. That this small group is far from representing the population at large is one of the ways in which online information may perpetuate important biases in the salience of some topics over others. The second paper analyzes news sharing in social media during one of the largest protest mobilizations in U.S. history to examine ideological asymmetries in the posting of news content. We extract the list of URLs shared during the mobilization period and we characterize those web sites in terms of their audience reach and the ideological composition of that audience. We also analyze the reliability of the sites in terms of the credibility and transparency of the information they publish. We show that there is no evidence of unreliable sources having any prominent visibility during the protest period, but we do identify asymmetries in the ideological slant of the sources shared, with a clear bias towards right-leaning domains. Our results suggest that online networks are contested spaces where the activism of progressive movements coexists with the narratives of mainstream media, which gain visibility under the same stream of information but whose reporting is not necessarily aligned with the activists’ goals.

About the speaker:

Sandra González-Bailón is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, and affiliated faculty at the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences. Her research lies at the intersection of network science, computational tools, and political communication. She is the author of Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). More information on her research can be found at https://sandragonzalezbailon.net/
 
Her articles have appeared in journals like PNAS, Nature, Science, Political Communication, The Journal of Communication, and Social Networks, among others. She is the author of the book Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). She serves as Associate Editor for the journals Social Networks, EPJ Data Science, and The International Journal of Press/Politics, and she is a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. She leads the research group DiMeNet (/daɪmnet/) — acronym for Digital Media, Networks, and Political Communication.

 

Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2021-22 Colloquium series "Aligning Incentives for Better Health and More Resilient Health Systems in Asia”

How can policymakers quantify the net value of medical spending? For what medical conditions has the “bang for the buck” been greatest, and for what conditions has spending outstripped gains in health improvement? Join this virtual workshop to learn about cutting-edge methods that can be applied to health system data to understand the net value of changes in medical spending over time, and how policymakers can track the effectiveness of policies to increase productivity of medical spending. In addition to several Asian policymakers already involved, virtual workshop participants will have the opportunity to pose questions to the expert speakers about applying these methods to their own health system settings, including advice about data, outcomes, and relevance for specific policy questions.

David Cutler is the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics in the Department of Economics, Harvard University, with secondary appointments at the Kennedy School of Government and the School of Public Health. He was associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for Social Sciences from 2003-2008. Professor Cutler served on the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council during the Clinton Administration and has advised several presidential campaigns, including as Senior Health Care Advisor for the Obama Presidential Campaign. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the Institute of Medicine, and he has held positions with the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Sciences

Abe Dunn is the Assistant Chief Economist at the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  His work has focused on the production and development of a new satellite account for health care and on evaluating and using alternative data sources for measurement purposes.  The Health Care Satellite Account uses billions of medical care claims from public and private sources to improve measurement for the U.S. health care sector, which allows researchers to analyze spending trends by medical condition.  Dr. Dunn has published research on a range of topics with a particular focus on health economic issues and measurement.  Most recently, his research has focused on measuring both the cost and the quality of medical care treatments. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin with a primary focus in the areas of health economics and industrial organization.

Professor Marcia Weaver earned a PhD in economics at the University of Chicago. She specializes in cost-effectiveness analysis and has published 87 peer-reviewed articles. At the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), she leads the research team on cost-effectiveness analyses of interventions to reduce the burden of disease. Prior to joining IHME she served as principal investigator of the Integrated Infectious Disease Capacity Building Evaluation in partnership with the Infectious Diseases Institute in Uganda. In the United States, she published on cost-effectiveness of interventions for people with HIV, chronic mental illness and substance abuse, and on a joint campaign to promote influenza and pneumococcal vaccines. Professor Weaver also has extensive experience with evaluating the effects of clinical training programs in Botswana, Indonesia, Namibia, South Africa, Thailand, and the Caribbean region, and served as a long-term advisor on health system reform to ministries of health in Niger and Central African Republic.

*For fall quarter 2021, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone.

 

Join us on November 16th for “Analyzing Social Media From A User-eye View With PIEGraph” from 12 - 1 PM PT featuring Deen Freelon, associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina. This session will be moderated by Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and is organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative. 

Quantitative social media research has traditionally been conducted from what might be called a platform-centric view, wherein researchers sample, collect, and analyzed data based on one or more topic- or user-specific keywords. Such studies have yielded many valuable insights, but they convey little about individual users’ tailored social media environments—what Professor Freelon calls the user-eye view. Studies that investigate social media from a user-eye view tend to be rare because of the expense involved and a limited number of suitable tools. This talk introduces PIEGraph, a novel system for user-eye view research that offers key advantages over existing systems. PIEGraph is lightweight, scalable, open-source, OS-independent, and collects data viewable from mobile and desktop interfaces directly from APIs. The system incorporates an extensible tagging taxonomy that allows for straightforward classification of a wide range of political, social, and cultural phenomena. The presentation will focus on how Professor Freelon’s research team is using PIEGraph to examine users’ potential levels of exposure to high- and low-quality information sources across the ideological spectrum.

Speakers:

Deen Freelon is an associate professor at the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina and a principal researcher at the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP). His theoretical interests address how ordinary citizens use social media and other digital communication technologies for political purposes, paying particular attention to how identity characteristics (e.g. race, gender, ideology) influence these uses. Methodologically, he is interested in how computational research techniques can be used to answer some of the most fundamental questions of communication science. Freelon has worked at the forefront of political communication and computational social science for over a decade, coauthoring some of the first communication studies to apply computational methods to social media data. 

Jeff Hancock is the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab and is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Professor Hancock and his group work on understanding psychological and interpersonal processes in social media. The team specializes in using computational linguistics and experiments to understand how the words we use can reveal psychological and social dynamics, such as deception and trust, emotional dynamics, intimacy and relationships, and social support. Recently Professor Hancock has begun work on understanding the mental models people have about algorithms in social media, as well as working on the ethical issues associated with computational social science.

Turkey-US relations have been going through the most turbulent episode since 2016. While occasional divergence of opinion between partners is natural, the frequency and the intensity of such disagreements have sharply increased over time, creating major trust issues between the allies. This talk will address the main causes behind the rift between Turkey and the US,  and warning against the path-dependent foreign policy behavior, will make specific policy recommendations to manage the bilateral tensions.
 

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Oya Dursun-Özkanca is the Endowed Chair of International Studies Professor of Political Science at Elizabethtown College and the author of Turkey–West Relations: The Politics of Intra-alliance Opposition (Cambridge University Press 2019), and The Nexus Between Security Sector Reform/Governance and Sustainable Development Goal-16: An Examination of Conceptual Linkages and Policy Recommendations (The Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance 2021). Her edited volumes include The European Union as an Actor in Security Sector Reform (Routledge, 2014) and External Interventions in Civil Wars (with Stefan Wolff, Routledge, 2014).

In Fall 2021, she is a visiting scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. 

For winter quarter 2022, CISAC will be hosting hybrid events. Many events will offer limited-capacity in-person attendance for Stanford faculty, staff, fellows, visiting scholars, and students in accordance with Stanford’s health and safety guidelines, and be open to the public online via Zoom. All CISAC events are scheduled using the Pacific Time Zone. 

                                                                                           

 

About the Event: Rather than assuming convergence in countries' military capabilities, this seminar examines why and how countries decide to develop different weapon capabilities within similar domains of warfare. To answer these questions, this seminar will explore the role of ideas and institutional bargaining in shaping decisions about military technology. This talk will subsequently apply the theory to the development of missile defense from the 1980s until today.

 

About the Speaker: Sanne Verschuren is a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University. Her research interests include the development of military technology, shifts in military strategy and tactics, and the role of ideas and norms therein. Her book project examines why and how countries decide to procure different weapon capabilities within similar military domains, particularly the development of missile defense (1980s-today), air power (1920s-1930s), and aircraft carriers (1950s-1960s). At CISAC, Sanne conducts research on the intersection between nuclear and conventional weapons. Sanne received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Brown University in August 2021.