Stanford University

Scott Kennedy

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Skyline Scholar (2026-27), Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions
Senior Adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics, Center for Strategic and International Studies
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Scott Kennedy is senior adviser and Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). A leading authority on the Chinese economy, his ongoing areas of focus include China’s high-tech drive, U.S.-China relations, and global economic governance. Kennedy has been traveling to China for 38 years. His major publications include The Power of Innovation: The Strategic Value of China’s High-Tech Drive (CSIS, March 2026); U.S.-China Scholarly Recoupling: Advancing Mutual Understanding in an Era of Intense Rivalry (CSIS, March 2024); (with Wang Jisi) Breaking the Ice: The Role of Scholarly Exchange in Stabilizing U.S.-China Relations (CSIS, 2023); China’s Uneven High-Tech Drive: Implications for the United States (CSIS, 2020); Global Governance and China: The Dragon’s Learning Curve (Routledge, 2018); The Fat Tech Dragon: Benchmarking China’s Innovation Drive (CSIS, 2017); and The Business of Lobbying in China (Harvard University Press, 2005). His commentaries and articles have appeared the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, China Quarterly, and China Journal. Kennedy is co-organizer of the track-2 U.S.-China Global Economic Order (GEO) Dialogue, and he hosts the China Field Notes podcast, which features voices from on the ground in China.

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Jiayi Hou

Encina Hall, East, 5th Floor

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Postdoctoral Scholar, China Labor, Income and Population Research Program
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Jiayi Hou is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions (SCCEI) and a Research Associate at the HKU Centre for AI, Management and Organization (CAMO). He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Peking University in 2025. His research spans digital, organizational, and labor economics, with a focus on the adoption and use of AI in the workplace and the economic and social effects of digital platforms.

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Parenting Style and Mental Health Issues Among Primary School Children in Rural China

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Background
Mental health problems among young children have become a common public health issue worldwide. As the family plays a crucial role in creating a favorable environment for children’s mental health, the parenting style of caregivers is a key factor related to children’s mental health issues. This study aims to examine the associations between parenting styles of primary caregivers and the mental health of their primary school child in rural China and identifies the factors that may influence the adoption of different parenting styles.

Methods
Data were collected from 1,298 primary school children (aged 9–11) and their primary caregivers in northwestern China. The primary caregivers completed the Parenting Styles and Dimensions Questionnaire, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, and a socio-demographic questionnaire. The cognitive development of children was measured using the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Fourth Edition, and the non-cognitive development of children was evaluated using the Ages and Stages Questionnaire: Social-Emotional. We performed descriptive statistics, linear regression analysis, and multivariable regression analysis.

Results
Our data showed that 17% of the sampled children exhibited total difficulty problems. The results indicated that authoritative parenting style was negatively associated with child mental health problems. In contrast, authoritarian parenting style was positively associated with child mental health problems. Analysis of combined parenting styles revealed that the combinations that included relatively more intensive authoritative parenting styles was associated with reduced incidence of child mental health problems. In contrast, the combinations that were found to have relatively more authoritarian parenting styles were associated with higher rates of mental health issues among children. Demographic characteristics, such as child gender, child developmental outcomes, child attending preschools, identity of primary caregiver, and family economic status, that were associated with the adoption of different parenting styles.

Conclusions
The study indicates that an authoritative parenting style is positively associated child mental health outcomes. Likewise, when authoritative strategies are more prominent within combined parenting styles, the likelihood that a child will experience mental health problems decreases. In contrast, the more dominant authoritarian behaviors are, the greater the risk of child mental health problems. Therefore, primary caregivers should be encouraged to adopt more positive parenting styles, which can help promote better outcomes of child mental health.

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BMC Psychology
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Scott Rozelle

From Trade War to Green Transition: Optimal Electric Vehicle Tariffs with Revenue-Funded Subsidies

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We study the optimal design of trade and industrial policy when governments pursue environmental objectives alongside traditional national welfare. Motivated by the global transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and growing concerns about competitiveness, resilience, and the environment, we develop a framework in which policymakers choose tariffs and domestic production subsidies to maximize national welfare, defined as the sum of consumer surplus, domestic profits, environmental benefits, and tariff revenue net of subsidies. We combine a theoretical model of differentiated-product oligopoly with a structural demand model estimated using vehicle-level data from 13 countries during 2004-2023 that together account for the vast majority of global EV sales. Our central finding is that the optimal policy combines a moderate tariff on imported EVs with a subsidy to domestic EV production financed through tariff revenue. This policy substantially outperforms both outright protectionism and laissez-faire. Relative to current policies, it preserves consumer access to affordable EVs, accelerates fleet electrification, supports domestic producers, and remains budget-neutral. For the United States, the optimal policy more than doubles EV market share, generates over $45 billion in annual welfare gains, and avoids approximately 95 million tons of lifetime CO2 emissions. A key mechanism underlying these results is the pass-through of tariffs and subsidies to prices, which depends critically on demand curvature, product substitution, and market structure. More broadly, our results suggest that effective industrial policy requires careful attention to market structure and country-specific conditions, balancing consumer, producer, fiscal, and environmental objectives rather than adhering to ideological prescriptions.

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National Bureau of Economic Research
Authors
Shanjun Li

The Health Care Cost of Air Pollution: Evidence from the World’s Largest Payment Network

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This paper exploits the universe of credit- and debit-card transactions in China during 2013–2015 and provides the first nationwide analysis of the health care cost of PM2.5 for a developing country. We leverage spatial spillovers of PM2.5 from long-range transport to generate exogenous variation in local pollution, and we employ a flexible distributed lag model to capture semiparametrically the dynamic response of pollution exposure. We find significant impacts of PM2.5 on health care spending in both the short and medium terms. A 10 g/m decrease in PM2.5 would reduce annual health care spending by over $9.2 billion, about 1.5% of China’s annual health care expenditure.

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The Review of Economics and Statistics
Authors
Shanjun Li

Matthew Kohrman Quoted in the New York Times on China's Gender-Skewed Smoking Culture

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In China, which consumes roughly half the world’s cigarettes and where local smoking bans are rarely enforced, friction between smokers and a younger, largely smoke-free generation is rising. This younger cohort increasingly confronts smokers and uses social media to amplify its grievances.

Smoking in China also demonstrates a stark gender divide: half of Chinese men smoke compared to fewer than 2 percent of women. This disparity reflects a long history of social stigma directed at female smoking in official propaganda. “Nationalist trailblazers began tarring female smoking as 'Western humiliation' in the early 1900s,” Stanford anthropologist Matthew Kohrman, a faculty affiliate with APARC who studies China’s tobacco industry and gender issues, tells the New York Times. When the Communist Party took over in 1949, it “excoriated female smoking anew but also rebuilt the country’s war-torn tobacco industry” as a source of revenue, he said. Read the article >

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Conflicts over smoking are becoming more prominent as China's younger generation is actively speaking out against exposure to secondhand smoke.

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Seeing Like a State: The Organizational Logic of China’s Corporate Social Credit System with Lauren Yu-hsin Lin, Curtis Milhaupt, and Scott Rozelle

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Wednesday, October 7, 2026 | 12:00 pm -1:30 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Conference Room, Encina Hall, E409, 616 Jane Stanford Way

 

Seeing Like a State: The Organizational Logic of China’s Corporate Social Credit System

 

The digitization of surveillance has expanded the capacities of the government to monitor corporate behavior. Using panel data of listed firms in Zhejiang Province from 2021 to 2023, we examine the organizational logic of China’s Corporate Social Credit System (CSCS), a digital governance instrument designed to assess the “trustworthiness” of firms. By design, more “trustworthy” firms will be subject to less government monitoring and have better access to government contracts and market financing. The empirical evidence shows that the CSCS rewards organizational characteristics associated with regulatory compliance and political embeddedness, while firms with more independent boards are less likely to gain points through Social Responsibility activities such as charity and government awards. This pattern reflects a broader logic of rendering firms administratively legible to the state. Cross-sectional analysis suggests that the channels of political embeddedness shift over time, from latent personal political ties to the more recent, formal Party-building provisions adopted across the largely non-SOE sample. The evidence also supports a behavior modification effect, with lower-rated firms improving their scores over time, mainly by paying back taxes and administrative fines, while top-rated firms remain stable. In addition, variation in scores across firms is driven mainly by persistent, firm-level differences rather than by changes in firm characteristics over time. Our findings reveal the logic of CSCS in institutionalizing a hierarchical order of corporate “trustworthiness” through which corporate activities become administratively legible, thereby advancing a distinct state-centric model of corporate governance.


About the Speakers 
 

Lauren Yu-hsin Li new

Lauren Yu-Hsin Lin (J.S.D. ’10) is a Professor of Law at City University of Hong Kong, President of the Asian Law and Economics Association (AsLEA), and a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI). A former corporate attorney, her empirical research explores Chinese corporate governance, securities regulation, and state-market institutions—focusing on political influence, party-building in enterprises, and regulatory developments in China. Her scholarship is published in leading journals, including the Journal of Legal Studies and The China Quarterly, cited by the U.S. SEC and U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, and featured in The Wall Street Journal and The Economist.

 

Curtis J. Milhaupt Photo

Curtis J. Milhaupt is an internationally recognized expert on comparative corporate governance, the legal systems of East Asia (particularly Japanese law), and state capitalism. He is a Fellow of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and an elected member of the American Law Institute.

In addition to numerous scholarly articles, he has co-authored or edited seven books, including Regulating the Visible Hand? The Institutional Implications of Chinese State Capitalism (Oxford, 2016), Law and Capitalism: What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development Around the World (Chicago, 2008) and Transforming Corporate Governance in East Asia (Routledge, 2008). His research has been profiled in The Economist, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal and has been widely translated. He is the 2024 recipient of the Cleary Gottlieb Prize for his ECGI working paper, “The (Geo)Politics of Controlling Shareholders.”

 

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Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. He received his BS from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MS and PhD from Cornell University. Previously, Rozelle was a professor at the University of California, Davis and an assistant professor in Stanford’s Food Research Institute and department of economics. He currently is a member of several organizations, including the American Economics Association, the International Association for Agricultural Economists, and the Association for Asian Studies. Rozelle also serves on the editorial boards of Economic Development and Cultural Change, Agricultural Economics, the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and the China Economic Review.

His research focuses almost exclusively on China and is concerned with: agricultural policy, including the supply, demand, and trade in agricultural projects; the emergence and evolution of markets and other economic institutions in the transition process and their implications for equity and efficiency; and the economics of poverty and inequality, with an emphasis on rural education, health and nutrition.


Questions? Contact SCCEI at sccei-info@stanford.edu
 

Goldman Conference Room, Encina Hall, E409

Lauren Yu-hsin Lin, Professor of Law, City University of Hong Kong
Curtis J. Milhaupt, Professor of Law, Stanford University
Scott Rozelle, Senior Fellow, Stanford University
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Student Seminar | May 14, 2027

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About the Student Seminar Series


Our Student Seminar Series offers emerging China scholars an opportunity to engage directly with interdisciplinary faculty and peers from across campus to discuss and receive feedback on their research. Each seminar features one or several PhD students presenting their latest empirical findings on issues related to China’s economy. Past topics have included college major selection as an obstacle to socioeconomic mobility, the effect of a cooling-off period on marriage outcomes, and factors contributing to government corruption. Faculty and senior scholars provide comments and feedback for improvement. This event series helps to build and strengthen Stanford’s community of young researchers working on China.

Student Seminars are held on select Fridays from 12 - 1 pm. Lunch will be provided! 

Visit the Student Seminar Series webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Learn More About the Student Seminar Series

Goldman Conference Room, Encina Hall, E409

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Student Seminar | April 30, 2027

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About the Student Seminar Series


Our Student Seminar Series offers emerging China scholars an opportunity to engage directly with interdisciplinary faculty and peers from across campus to discuss and receive feedback on their research. Each seminar features one or several PhD students presenting their latest empirical findings on issues related to China’s economy. Past topics have included college major selection as an obstacle to socioeconomic mobility, the effect of a cooling-off period on marriage outcomes, and factors contributing to government corruption. Faculty and senior scholars provide comments and feedback for improvement. This event series helps to build and strengthen Stanford’s community of young researchers working on China.

Student Seminars are held on select Fridays from 12 - 1 pm. Lunch will be provided! 

Visit the Student Seminar Series webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Learn More About the Student Seminar Series

Goldman Conference Room, Encina Hall, E409

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Student Seminar | April 9, 2027

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About the Student Seminar Series


Our Student Seminar Series offers emerging China scholars an opportunity to engage directly with interdisciplinary faculty and peers from across campus to discuss and receive feedback on their research. Each seminar features one or several PhD students presenting their latest empirical findings on issues related to China’s economy. Past topics have included college major selection as an obstacle to socioeconomic mobility, the effect of a cooling-off period on marriage outcomes, and factors contributing to government corruption. Faculty and senior scholars provide comments and feedback for improvement. This event series helps to build and strengthen Stanford’s community of young researchers working on China.

Student Seminars are held on select Fridays from 12 - 1 pm. Lunch will be provided! 

Visit the Student Seminar Series webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Learn More About the Student Seminar Series

Goldman Conference Room, Encina Hall, E409

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