Tuesday, February 1, 2022 | 4:00-5:15 pm Pacific Time

The Impacts of Pollution Levies on Chinese Firms

China's rollout of emission fee reform since 2007 provides a quasi-natural experiment to study the effectiveness of pollution levy on firm emissions and economic consequences. Using firm-level financial and pollution data, we find that doubling the levy rate leads to a 6.87% reduction in SO2 emissions. Firms achieve emission abatement through reducing output and coal consumption rather than end-of-the-pipe solutions. 

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About the Speaker

Junjie Zhang is Associate Professor of Environmental Economics in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. Since 2016, he has founded the Environmental Research Center and International Master of Environmental Policy Program at Duke Kunshan University. During 2021-22, he serves as Volkswagen Visiting Chair in Sustainability in the Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University. Zhang is a co-chair for the Environmental Economics Committee in the Chinese Academy of Environmental Science, an advisory board member for the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and a board member for the Professional Association for China's Environment. He has also served on the editorial board of several academic journals. Before his current position, he was an associate professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. Zhang's research centers on empirical policy issues in air pollution, energy transition, and climate change. He has received fundings from the U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, China National Natural Science Foundation, China's Ministry of Ecology and Environment, China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, Energy Foundation, Packard Foundation, World Bank, and Asian Development Bank. He holds a B.S. from Renmin University of China, a B.S. and an M.S. from Tsinghua University, and a Ph.D. from Duke University.

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Seminar Series Moderators:

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. 

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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Register Here

Register once to receive the Zoom meeting link that will be used for all lectures in this series.

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. 

(Stanford faculty, visiting scholars, staff, fellows, and students only)

                                                                                           

 

About the Event: In Nigeria today, frequent conflicts, disappearances and mass violence, especially in the Northern region of the country, have amounted to large-scale destruction of human life and the displacement of large populations as unarmed civilians are caught in the crossfire. The effects of climate change on the Lake Chad basin are key triggers of conflict as herders migrate to other parts of the region to find fodder and water for their cattle. Existing responses to conflict and mass violence in Nigeria have been beset by challenges. The migration patterns of nomadic communities have begun to signal security concerns beyond the immediately impacted regions. In late 2017, state governments within the western and southern parts of the country began to set up community policing strategies to address growing security challenges around their states, including those relating to the (perceived) threats associated with the movement of cattle herders. Complicating this situation, the presence of large groups of cattle has incentivized “conflict entrepreneurship” as armed groups of young men across north-central, north-west and southern parts of the country engage in cattle rustling. Government efforts at various levels, ranging from the creation of legal and policy frameworks to programs on-the-ground, have been inadequate to protect civilians and have led to the development new mechanisms for human protection.  For example, interventions by the Nigerian Federal Government have, at times, accelerated conflict, as with the passage of an anti-grazing law that has fueled controversy over implementation at state and local levels of government. Local civil society initiatives have continued to emerge to address the gap and attempt to mitigate ever growing security concerns in the region. One such strategy has involved the development of Early Warning and Early Response Systems (EWER) using geospatial technologies and other forms of crowd sourcing imagery to enhance local resilience in the face of security threats and strengthen the ability of communities to protect themselves in a sustainable way. However, the potential of such technologies depends on the ability to “see” particular phenomena and render other phenomena illegible. This paper will argue that such geospatial technology’s interpretive power is concerned with assigning to future violence an interpretive code based on its baseline values.  As an act of decoding that is anticipatory, the power of EWER processes lies in its decoding potential. These interpretive code processes provide participants with the potential to engage in analyses that involve mapping patterns and potential risk that have the ability to produce indicators that have material effects. It is these material effects, drawn from visual codes, that are used to justify action that is life preserving as well as render other relations illegible and therefore invisible to intervention.  This paper explores the emergence of EWER strategies used to address widespread violence and the challenge of illegibility that is central to it.

 

About the Speaker: M. Kamari Clarke is the Distinguished Professor of Transnational Justice and Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto where she teaches in the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. Over her career she has worked at The University of California Los Angeles (2018-2021), Carleton University (2015-2018), The University of Pennsylvania (2013-2015) Yale University (1999-2013), and at Yale she was the former chair of the Council on African Studies from 2007- 2010 and the co-founder of the Yale Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis.  For more than twenty years, Professor Clarke has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, human rights and international law, religious nationalism and the politics of globalization. For more than 20 years, Professor Clarke has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, international legal domains, religious nationalism, and the politics of globalization and race. She  is the author of nine books and over fifty peer reviewed articles and book chapters, including her 2009 publication of Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Affective Justice (with Duke University Press, 2019), which won the finalist prize for the American Anthropological Association’s 2020 Elliot P. Skinner Book Award for the Association for Africanist Anthropology.  Clarke has also been the recipient of other research and teaching awards, including Carleton University’s 2018 Research Excellence Award.  During her academic career she has held numerous prestigious fellowships, grants and awards, including multiple grant awards from the National Science Foundation and from The Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and, very recently, the 2021 Guggenhiem Award for Career Excellence.

Mary K. Goldstein, MD, MS, is a Professor of Health Policy and a core faculty member at the Department of Health Policy and the Center for Health Policy, and the Director of the Geriatrics Research Education and Clinical Center (GRECC) at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. She directs the Stanford/VA Palo Alto Geriatric Medicine Fellowship Program, and the Special Fellowship Program in Advanced Geriatrics at VA Palo Alto. She also serves as associate director for the Physician Post-Residency Fellowship Program in Health Services Research and Development, and for the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Medical Informatics, both at VA Palo Alto Health Care System.

Goldstein studies innovative methods of implementing evidence-based clinical practice guidelines for quality improvement. She leads the ATHENA Decision Support System project that has developed and implemented an automated clinical decision support system for primary care clinicians, using hypertension as a model, and now extended into several other clinical domains.  Goldstein's research also explores older adults' health preferences (health utility) for application to cost-effectiveness analysis.

Mark Helfand, MD, MS, FACP, is Professor of Medicine and Professor of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology at the Oregon Health & Science University. He is board-certified in Internal Medicine and practices hospital medicine at the Portland VA Medical Center, where he is a staff physician and directs the VA Evidence Synthesis Program Coordinating Center. He founded the Oregon Evidence-based Practice Center (now the Pacific Northwest EPC) in 1997 and, in the 2000’s, led the EPC’s work for the US Preventive Services Task Force and for OHSU’s pioneering Drug Effectiveness Review Project.

For winter 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. 

Katherine Meckel,  PhD, MA, is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California San Diego and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She specializes in topics in public finance, health economics, and environmental economics.

Arden Morris is a health services researcher, professor of surgery, and director of S-SPIRE Center. She has used claims, clinical datasets, and mixed methods to focus on race/ethnicity, socioeconomic position, and quality and outcomes of cancer care. More recently, she has focused on financial toxicity of cancer care and patient out-of-pocket costs that may influence their treatment decisions.

Bhutan time: Friday, February 4th, 2022, 8am to 9am.

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

The Minister of Health of Bhutan, Her Excellency Dasho Dechen Wangmo, will share her insights and experiences from managing the national health system during the COVID-19 crisis, serving as President of the 74th World Health Assembly, and her views on health system strengthening, innovative primary care, chronic disease control, health governance, and the global implications of the pandemic as it unfolds in its third year.

Her Excellency Dasho Dechen Wangmo, the only female Minister in the current cabinet of Bhutan, formally took charge of the Ministry of Health on 7th November 2018. Prior to joining politic in 2018, Her Excellency worked as a public health international consultant with primary focus on health systems, governance, policy and strategic planning for governments and civil societies in many countries (USA, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, PNG, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Senegal). She brings her background working on various global health issues including health system strengthening, health governance, grant implementation, monitoring and evaluation system to the current portfolio.

On 17th December 2020 in recognition of her outstanding service to the Nation, she was conferred the “Red Scarf”, one of highest honors a Bhutanese civilian can receive, by His Majesty the King. Her Excellency is a passionate public health advocate and social worker at heart. Hon’ble Lyonpo was nominated as the President of the 74th World Health Assembly (WHA) by Member States of the WHO’s South East Asia Region in 2020. She will hold the office of the President for a duration of one year and it is an honour bestowed on Bhutan for the first time since it became a member of the WHO in 1982.

In addition to her memberships in professional organizations, she is also a founder of the Bhutan Cancer Society, a CSO working for the well being of cancer patients in Bhutan, and a founding chairperson for Lhaksam, the HIV-positive network in the country. Her Excellency has a Master in Public Health (MPH) from Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, USA, and a Bachelor in Cardiopulmonary Science (magna cum laude) from Northeastern University, Boston, USA.

Joshua Salomon, PhD, is a Professor of Health Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His research focuses on public health policy and priority-setting, including modeling patterns and trends in major causes of global mortality and disease burden; evaluation of health interventions and policies; and measurement and valuation of health outcomes. He is director of the Prevention Policy Modeling Lab, a multi-institution research consortium that conducts health and economic modeling relating to infectious disease. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Salomon has worked extensively with policymakers on data synthesis, modeling and decision analysis to inform the public health response.

David Chan, MD, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Medicine and an investigator at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Drawing on labor and organizational economics, he is interested in studying how information is used in health care, how this affects productivity, and implications for design. He is the recipient of the 2014 NIH Director’s High-Risk, High-Reward Early Independence Award to study the optimal balance of information in health information technology for patient care.