Lina Khatib is the manager and co-founder of the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy at Stanford University's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. She is an expert on Middle East politics and media and has published widely on topics such as new media and Islamism, political media and conflict in the Arab world, and the political dynamics in Lebanon and Iran. She is also a Research Fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy at the Annenberg School. She is currently writing a book titled Image Politics in the Middle East for IB Tauris, which examines the power struggles among states, political leaders, political parties, civil society groups, and citizens in the region. She has also recently led a research project on US public diplomacy towards the Arab world in the digital age. She is the author of two books, Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World (2006), and Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond (2008) and has published widely on Middle East politics. 

In this seminar, she will talk about how Lebanon reached the political crisis it is in right now, the political strategy that has led to it, and what this means for Lebanon's political future.

Dr. Brian Chen's research has examined the tradeoffs between moral hazard and efficiencies in the integration of physician and non-physician medical services in the presence of asymmetric information. He has looked at a policy intervention in Taiwan that prohibited self-referrals of patients to physician-owned pharmacies unless the physician group integrated pharmacy services into the clinic by hiring an onsite pharmacist. He found that the policy reduced drug expenditures by close to thirty percent among physicians that did not have an onsite pharmacist. However, these physicians responded by increasing the overprovision of diagnostic services not covered by the policy, thereby reducing the effectiveness of the policy. Forty-five percent of the clinics that did not have an onsite pharmacist prior to the policy hired one subsequent to the implementation of the policy. Overall, after integration, the policy applied to only seventeen percent of clinics, and only reduced average discretionary expenditures by about two-point-five percent. Chen's research also shows that despite the reduction in drug utilization, patients treated at clinics without an onsite pharmacist did not have greater observable adverse health events than patients treated at integrated clinics. His results show that moral hazard costs of self-referral incentives are large, that the “safe harbor” exemption severely reduces the effectiveness of the policy, and that the exemption explains much of the recent integration of ancillary services into physician offices.

Dr. Brian Chen recently completed his Ph.D. in business administration in the Business and Public Policy Group at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. He received a Juris Doctor from Stanford Law School in 1997, and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1992.

This colloquium will feature presentations by two visiting scholars from China. First, Dr. Huijun Liu will present research on health risks associated with gender imbalance in China. The problems of abnormal sex ratio at birth and high female infant mortality have plagued many Asian countries with a strong male preference and gender inequality. In China, these problems having lasted for more than twenty years and contributed to a serious gender imbalance in the population. As a direct consequence, “surplus men” or “forced bachelors,” are expected to increase to more than 30 million. Dr. Liu will discuss the potential health risks and other social problems likely to be exacerbated by this large-scale gender imbalance in China.

Second, Dr. Dahai Zhao will present “How Is Health Insurance Coverage Utilized among Migrant Workers in Shanghai, China?” According to the regulations of the Chinese national and Shanghai municipal governments, migrant workers employed in Shanghai should all be entitled to the Shanghai Migrant Worker Hospitalization Insurance (SMWHI) without premium and the vast majority should also have coverage through the New Rural Cooperative Medical System (NRCMS). Dr. Zhao will present results from research, conducted jointly with Dr. Wei Yu and Dr. Alan M. Garber, examining the status of the coverage and utilization of health insurance among migrant workers employed in Shanghai. Through their study, they found that a significant minority of migrant workers in Shanghai still had no health insurance, and that health insurance utilization among migrant workers was strongly limited by hospital location.

Huijun Liu is an associate professor in the Public Policy and Administration School at Xi'an Jiaotong University, China. She received her PhD in management science and engineering from the Management School of Xi'an Jiaotong University. Her main areas of research focus on gender imbalance, reproductive health, vulnerability, and social support. Her current research focuses on how gender imbalance and migration amplify the risk of HIV transmission in China. Liu has published over twenty papers in Chinese academic journals, including China Soft Science, Population and Economics, Psychological Science Advance, Collection of Women's Studies, and Modern Preventive Medicine.

Dr. Zhao is an assistant professor with the School of Public Economics and Administration at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (SUFE), and a fellow with the Center for Health Policy at SUFE. He earned a master's degree in medicine in 2005 and a PhD in 2008, both from Fudan University, China.

Frédéric Mitterrand is the French Minister of Culture and Communication. Throughout his career, he has been an actor, screenwriter, television presenter, writer, producer and director.

Sponsored by The France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, The San Francisco French Consulate, The Stanford Humanities Center and The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford University.

John Micklethwait is the Editor-in-Chief of The Economist. After studying history at Magdalen College, Oxford, he worked as a banker at Chase Manhattan between 1985 and 1987 before joining The Economist as a finance correspondent in 1987. Since then his roles at The Economist have included setting up the bureau in Los Angeles, where he worked from 1990‑93; being the newspaper's media correspondent; editing the business section; running the New York bureau; and editing the United States section. The Economist now has a circulation of around 1.4 million worldwide.

Mr. Micklethwait has appeared on radio and television around the world. He has co-authored with Adrian Wooldridge, also an Economist journalist, five books: The Witch Doctors; "A Future Perfect: the Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalisation; The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea; The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America and God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World, published by the Penguin Press in April 2009.

Mr. Micklethwait was named Editors' Editor of the Year at the British Society of Magazine Editors 2010 annual awards.

Ethical consumerism has been around for a long time—during the revolution, many Americans protested against the Stamp Act of 1756 by refusing to buy tea and other Brit- ish goods. In recent years, ethical consumerism has become an increasingly prominent feature of social life, as new forms of technology have allowed consumers to use their choices in the marketplace to address various environmental, labor and trade concerns.

Surprisingly, relatively little attention has been paid to the moral issues raised by ethical consumerism. Suppose that consumers are morally permitted to use their buying power to pressure companies to treat animals better or to reduce carbon emissions. Does this mean that they can also pressure pharmacies not to stock the “morning after” pill? Can they pressure Wal-Mart not to sell books or music that they find offensive? Even in cases where consumers are pressuring companies to do the right thing, do their actions amount to a kind of vigilante justice?

Waheed Hussain is an assistant professor in the Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University and an A.B. in Philosophy from Princeton University. His main research interests lie in moral and political philosophy, particularly in those areas that bear on the morality of economic life.

One of his major research projects focuses on the philosophical debate about how best to understand the political concern for freedom. After formulating and defending an interpretation of this concern, he argues that the most attractive economic arrangements from the standpoint of freedom are those that extend democratic forms of decision making into economic life. An example of such an arrangement would be the codetermination system in Germany, which gives representatives of labor a significant role to play in economic decision making.

Other current projects include developing a more adequate understanding of the nature of personal autonomy and its significance in political contexts, examining the role of secondary associations in a capitalist democracy, formulating a moral contractualist account of the duties of corporations and their managers, and assessing the case for the corporation's right (and perhaps duty) to engage in civil disobedience.

At Wharton, Professor Hussain teaches Legal Studies 210, Corporate Responsibility and Ethics and Legal Studies 226, Markets, Morality and the Future of Capitalism, which is cross-listed in both the Philosophy Department at Penn and the Program in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.