About the Speaker 

Professor Maggiori is the Moghadam Family Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. His research focuses on international macroeconomics and finance. He is a co-founder and director of the Global Capital Allocation Project. His research topics have included the analysis of exchange rates under imperfect capital markets, capital flows, the international monetary system, reserve currencies, geoeconomics, tax havens, very long-run discount rates and climate change, and expectations and portfolio investment. His research combines theory and data with the aim of improving international economic policy. He is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.

Among a number of honors, he is the recipient of the Fischer Black Prize awarded to an outstanding financial economist under the age of 40, the Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships, and the Bernacer Prize for outstanding contributions in macroeconomics and finance by a European economist under age 40.

The family of Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh donated his personal archive to the Stanford Libraries' Special Collections and endowed the Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture series to honor his legacy and to inspire future generations. Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh (1919-2004) was former Governor of the Central Bank in Taiwan. During his tenure, he was responsible for the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, and was widely recognized for achieving stability and economic growth. In his long and distinguished career as economist and development specialist, he held key positions in multilateral institutions including the Asian Development Bank, where as founding Director, he was instrumental in advancing the green revolution and in the transformation of rural Asia. Read more about Dr. Hsieh.

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SCCEI Seminar Series (Spring 2025)

Friday, April 18, 2025 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Intergenerational Mobility, Marital Sorting, and Social Closure: Patterns and Trends in China

Intergenerational social mobility and marital sorting by socioeconomic status have long been regarded as key indicators of societal openness. Since China’s economic reform, a sharp rise in economic inequality has coincided with declining social mobility, as individuals’ socioeconomic status increasingly mirrors that of their parents. At the same time, marital sorting by education has intensified, exacerbating inequality among Chinese families. While both trends suggest a growing degree of social closure, how they reinforce each other remains poorly understood. In this talk, I first review recent research on trends in social mobility and marital sorting in China. I then introduce a new measure of social closure, defined as the intergenerational association in educational attainment at the family level. Using a simple decomposition, I demonstrate how intergenerational educational mobility at the individual level and marital sorting have jointly shaped the evolution of social closure in China, and how the relative importance of these forces has differed between men and women.

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About the Speaker 
 

Xiang Zhou is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. His research broadly concerns inequality, education, causal inference, and statistical and computational methods. His work has appeared in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Journal of Political Economy, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, PNAS, among other peer-reviewed journals. Before coming to Harvard, Zhou worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. He received a PhD in Sociology and Statistics from the University of Michigan in 2015.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

In The Silent Withdrawal, Dian Zhong reveals a striking reversal in China’s once-celebrated gender equality, as women increasingly withdraw from the workforce despite higher education levels. Highlighting the policy missteps and the unintended consequences of pro-natalist measures, alongside the transformation of feminism from state collaboration to a force of resistance, Zhong calls for bold reforms to reconcile women’s economic empowerment with demographic challenges, steering China toward a more inclusive future.

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About the Author
 

Dian Zhong is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Hoover History Lab, focusing on the comparative histories of developing countries during the twentieth century. In addition to her Hoover appointment, Zhong also teaches the course 'Comparative Development of Latin America and East Asia' at Stanford University. Previously, Zhong was a lecturer in Portuguese at Beijing Foreign Studies University and a teaching and research assistant at the School of Government, Peking University.

Zhong is an experienced translator and interpreter proficient in Mandarin, Portuguese, and English, providing services for major international organizations such as the G20 and BRICS (the economic group of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). She has published extensively on topics such as the political economy of development, comparative political institutions, regime change, geopolitics, and China’s foreign policies toward Latin America. Her current research explores how rising feminism in China impacts existing challenges such as demographic shrinkage, risks of brain drain, labor market imbalances, and the transition from a low-skill, labor-intensive economy to a knowledge-based economy.

Zhong received her PhD in political science from Peking University.

Parking and Directions

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall (616 Jane Stanford Way) on the 4th floor of the East wing. For more detailed information on venue location and parking instructions, please visit this webpage. 
 

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Skyline Scholars Seminar Series

Tuesday, April 29, 2025 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

The Origin and Diffusion of Policy Ideas in China

Drawing on two decades of Chinese policy documents and government work reports, we document over 116,000 distinct policy ideas and trace their complete life cycles. Our analysis reveals three main findings. First, in the 2000s, policy innovation was highly decentralized—more than 80% of ideas originated from local governments, driven primarily by local officials. Second, after 2013, the central government shifted its incentives by ceasing rewards for bottom-up innovation and instead promoting the diligent enforcement of centrally assigned policies, leading to significant centralization of policy innovation. Third, focusing on industrial policies, we highlight tradeoffs between centralization and decentralization. Top-down industrial policies tend to be less aligned with local comparative advantages and are less effective at spurring industrial growth, revealing the cost of centralization. Conversely, under decentralization, strategic competition among local politicians can distort policy diffusion, reducing the fit between policies and local contexts and undermining their effectiveness. Quantitatively, our results indicate that since 2013, the costs of centralizing policy innovation in China have far outweighed its benefits.

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About the Speaker 
 

Shaoda Wang is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, a Skyline Scholar (2024-2025) at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions (SCCEI), a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis in Development (BREAD). He also serves as the deputy faculty director of the China branches of the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics (BFI-China) and the Energy Policy Institute at UChicago (EPIC-China). He is an applied economist with research interests in development economics, environmental economics, and political economy, with a regional focus on China. He holds a BA from Peking University and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining Harris, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Economics and Energy Policy Institute (EPIC) at the University of Chicago.

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Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu