SCCEI Seminar Series (Spring 2024)

Friday, May 10, 2024 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

The US-China Trade War: Quantify the Negative Shocks to Local Housing Markets and Land-Based Finance in Chinese Cities

China’s real estate market has experienced two decades of “golden age” with soaring housing prices ever since the housing marketization. Tax-sharing and land reforms eventually made city governments heavily rely on land sales (state-land use-right transfers) to generate fiscal revenues for expenditures; the so-called “land-based finance” or “land finance” sustained through self-fulfilling prophecy of housing price and land value appreciations supported by fast urbanization and economic growth. However, the US-China trade war started in 2018 and caused a drastically negative and exogenous shock to this feedback loop in Chinese cities, however. This research studies the trade war’s impacts on local housing markets and land-based finance. It constructs a shift-share measure transmitting the macro tariff changes to city-specific heterogeneous negative shocks. Analyses apply prefecture-city data spanning 2016-2019 and show that the tariffs were destructive to local housing markets and land finance besides hitting production. When cities experienced an extra percentage point (pp) of the weighted average tariff rate, transacted housing dropped by 3% and the prices fell by 1.2%, all else equal. The housing market tumbles deterred developers from buying state lands. The extra pp of the tariffs thus decreased the city government’s land-sale revenues by 7.6%. As Chinese cities faced, on average, a 1.62 pp increase in the average tariffs and, at the extreme, a 10.4 pp change within a year upon the trade war, impacts were substantial in hitting local housing markets and draining local public finance. Land-sale revenue declines between 12% to 79% were not uncommon. Further analysis reveals the more resilient cities in this trade-war were those with less severe overbuilding aka ghost-town phenomenon, a more diversified industrial base or export destinations, or a stronger tertiary sector. Overall, the US-China trade war could have more adversely impacted housing markets and local public finance in smaller cities than in big cities.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker 
 

Dr. Siqi Zheng is the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at the Center for Real Estate, and Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is the faculty director of the MIT Center for Real Estate. She established MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab in 2019, and MIT China Future City Lab in 2017, and is the faculty director of her Lab.Prof. Zheng was the former President of Asian Real Estate Society (2018-2019) and is on its Board now, and she is also on the Board of American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association (AREUEA). She is the Co-Editor of Journal of Regional Science, and Environmental and Resource Economics. She is also the Associated Editor of China Economic Review, and Journal of Economic Surveys, and is on the editorial board of Real Estate Economics, Journal of Housing Economics and Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. 

Prof. Zheng’s field of specialization is urban and environmental economics and policy, including sustainable urbanization, sustainable real estate, and urbanization in emerging economies. She published in many peer reviewed international journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, and the Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Geography, European Economic Review, Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Transportation Research Part A, Environment and Planning A, Ecological Economics, Journal of Regional Science, Real Estate Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. A book she has co-authored with Matthew Kahn, Blue Skies over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment in China (Princeton University Press) was published in 2016. Dr. Zheng has completed or been undertaking research projects granted or entrusted by the World Bank, the MassCPR, MITEI, MIT Portugal, MIT MCSC,  the Asian Development Bank, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, among others. She won the MIT Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising in 2022. She received her Ph.D. in urban development and real estate from Tsinghua University in 2005, and did her post-doc research at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Prior to coming to MIT, she was a professor and the director of Hang Lung Center for Real Estate at Tsinghua University, China.
 

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Winter 2024)

Friday, February 9, 2024 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

What Makes a Desirable Spouse in China? New Evidence from a National Survey Experiment

Drawing on national survey experiment data from the 2021 Chinese General Social Survey, this research examines never-married people’s spouse preferences. The findings show how multiple characteristics of fictional marriage candidates – age, appearance, parents’ rural/urban status, education, income, and homeownership – shape men’s and women’s evaluation of the candidates’ desirability. They underscore a need to comprehensively assess the relative importance of multiple characteristics of a marriage candidate in shaping individuals’ spouse preferences. In addition, both men and women prefer a better-looking spouse with higher socioeconomic status and more resources. The findings suggest that widely observed hypergamous and homogamous unions do not reflect the preferences of both spouses, thereby cautioning against inferring individual preferences from assortative mating outcomes. Last, the findings show that individuals’ spouse preferences are embedded in and differ between China’s rural and urban marriage markets. This research demonstrates the importance of directly examining spouse preferences in clarifying the mechanisms of marital sorting.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker 
 

Yue Qian is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She received her PhD in Sociology from the Ohio State University. Her research concerns inequality at the intersection of gender, family, and work in East Asia (China in particular) and North America. Currently, this work follows two lines of inquiry: (1) how mate selection and couple dynamics in intimate relationships reflect and shape gender inequality in the broader society; and (2) how social and mental health inequalities manifest and evolve in the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Qian has published over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles since 2014. Her work has appeared in top journals, such as Nature Human Behaviour, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, and Gender & Society.
 

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Winter 2024)

Friday, January 19, 2024 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

The Law and Economics of Lawyers: Evidence from the Revolving Door in China’s Judicial System
 

This paper studies the roles of lawyers in shaping judicial and economic outcomes, exploiting the unique setting of “revolving-door” lawyers in China’s judicial system. By compiling the first comprehensive dataset covering the universes of judges, lawyers, law firms, litigants, and lawsuits in China from 2014 to 2022, we identify over 14,000 judges who left their positions and joined private law firms as lawyers, which accounts for 6.5% of all judges (2.6% of all lawyers) nationwide. We document four main empirical patterns. First, in both criminal and commercial lawsuits, these revolving-door lawyers enjoy significant advantages in securing favorable court decisions for their clients. Second, leveraging intra-lawyer variation in performances at home vs. away courts, we show that the premium of revolving door lawyers comes from both “know who” and “know how.” Third, revolving-door lawyers add significant values to their firms beyond their roles as frontline lawyers, by mentoring junior colleagues and attracting larger clients. Fourth, the revolving door lawyers, by joining larger law firms that disproportionately serve rich individuals and large corporates, could exacerbate existing socio-economic inequalities in China.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker 
 

Shaoda Wang is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). He also serves as the Deputy Faculty Director at the Energy Policy Institute at UChicago, China center (EPIC-China). He is an applied economist with research interests in development economics, environmental economics, and political economy. His main research agenda aims at understanding the political economy of public policy, 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.
 

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2023)

Friday, December 1, 2023 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Social Media and Government Responsiveness: Evidence from Vaccine Procurement in China

This research studies how public opinion on social media affected local governments' procurement of vaccines in China during 2014-2019. To establish causality, we exploit city-level variation in the eruption of online opinion on vaccine safety, instrumented by quasi-random early penetration of social media. We find that governments in cities exposed to stronger social media shocks increased the share of more transparent procurement and reduced home bias by procuring more vaccines from nonlocal producers. The effect is driven by posts expressing anti-government sentiment instead of posts containing investigative information and is larger in cities where local officials face higher top-down political pressure.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker 
 

Yanhui Wu is an economist whose research concentrates on two areas: media economics and organizational economics. In media economics, he studies the political economy of mass media, particularly the underexplored subject of the media in China. In organizational economics, his research focuses on the organization of knowledge-intensive activities, particularly in the digital economy. Recently, he has worked with data scientists to develop new big data methods and apply them to the social sciences. His work has been published at top economics, management, and statistics journals, including the American Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Management Science, Organization Science, and the Journal of American Statistical Association.

Yanhui Wu is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Hong Kong and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR). Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Finance and Business Economics at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics in 2011. Prior to his doctoral study, he was an award-winning financial journalist in China.
 

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2023)

Friday, November 17, 2023 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

How Digital Surveillance Justifies Massive Lockdowns in China During COVID-19
 

China’s draconian response to COVID-19 drew considerable criticism, with many suggesting that intense digital surveillance and harsh lockdowns triggered the unusual public dissent seen in China in late 2022. However, we argue that rather than backfiring, digital surveillance may have legitimized the government’s overreaction by making uncertain threats appear certain. We collected data on daily counts of lockdown communities and COVID cases from 2020 to 2023. Using a difference-in-differences approach with World Value Surveys (China 2012, 2018) and a nationwide online survey in 2023, we show that real-world lockdowns significantly reduced public perception of respect for human rights and trust in the government; however, these effects are moderated by the pervasiveness of COVID surveillance, proxied by cellphone usage. To establish causality, we use a survey experiment to show that digital surveillance indeed increases support for COVID lockdowns by making citizens more likely to believe they are close contacts. In contrast, surveillance cannot justify protest crackdowns. Our findings suggest that uncertainty in threats to public safety may foster support for state surveillance and coercion.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker 
 

Xu Xu is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Xu studies digital authoritarianism, political repression, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on China. He is currently working on a book entitled Authoritarian Control in the Age of Digital Surveillance. His other ongoing projects examine the political aspects of artificial intelligence, social media propaganda, public opinion on state repression, and state-society relations in China. His work has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, among other peer-reviewed journals.

He received his Ph.D. in political science from Pennsylvania State University in 2019, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University from 2020 to 2021.
 

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Fall Seminar Series 

Friday, October 27, 2023 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Improving Regulation for Innovation: Evidence from China’s Pharmaceutical Industry

This study investigates the extent to which improved regulation can foster innovation by analyzing the impact of a major regulatory reform implemented in 2015 on the quantity and quality of innovation in China's pharmaceutical industry. Inspired by regulatory practices in the US, the reform aimed to address application backlogs and reduce administrative waiting time for new drug development. Using data at the drug and firm levels, we uncover three main findings: (1) drug categories experiencing improved approval times witnessed a surge in investigational new drug applications; (2) while there existed little improvement in within-drug innovation quality, the reform stimulated shifts in firm composition, leading to the influx of innovative new firm and enhancing aggregate-level drug innovativeness; and (3) the market recognized the improvement in drug innovation, evidenced by changes in stock prices following new drug registrations. Our findings highlight the important relationship between innovation quantity and quality, influenced by firm composition. They also suggest that emerging markets can enhance their innovation potential by adopting regulatory approaches akin to frontier countries.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker 
 

Ruixue Jia is an Associate Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, UC San Diego. Her research interests lie at the intersection of economics, history, and politics. One area of her research examines elite formation and its influence, both in historical and contemporary contexts. Another focus of her work is uncovering the deep historical origins of economic development. In recent years, she has studied the ongoing transformation of China's manufacturing sector and expanded her research to encompass labor and technology-related issues.

Jia is affiliated with BREAD, CESifo, CEPR, and NBER. She also serves as the co-director of UCSD's China Data Lab, which aims to lead China studies into a new era where contextual knowledge is tested and corroborated by social science methods and data.

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2023)

Friday, October 13, 2023 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Quid Pro Quo, Knowledge Spillover, and Industrial Quality Upgrading: Evidence from the Chinese Auto Industry

This paper studies the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) via quid pro quo (technology for market access) in facilitating knowledge spillover and quality upgrades. Our context is the Chinese automobile industry, where foreign automakers are required to set up joint ventures (the quid) with domestic automakers in return for market access (the quo). The identification strategy exploits a unique dataset of detailed vehicle quality measures along multiple dimensions and relies on within-product quality variation across dimensions. We show that affiliated domestic automakers, compared to their nonaffiliated counterparts, adopt more similar quality strengths of their joint venture partners. Quid pro quo generates knowledge spillover to affiliated domestic automakers in addition to any industry-wide spillover. We rule out alternative explanations involving endogenous joint venture network formation, overlapping customer bases, or direct technology transfer via market transactions. Analyses leveraging additional micro datasets on worker flows and upstream suppliers demonstrate that labor mobility and supplier networks are important channels mediating knowledge spillover. Finally, we estimate an equilibrium model for the auto industry and quantify the impact of quid-pro-quo-induced  quality upgrading on domestic sales and profits. Quid pro quo improved the quality of affiliated domestic models by 3.8-12.7% and raised their sales (profit) by 0.9-3.9% (1.02-3.49%) relative to unrestricted FDI.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker 
 

Jie Bai is an Assistant Professor in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Her research lies at the intersection between development, trade and industrial organization, focusing on microeconomic issues of firms in developing countries and emerging markets. Her past projects have examined firms’ incentive and ability to build a reputation for quality, collective reputational forces in export markets, the relationship between firm growth and corruption, and the impact of internal trade barriers among Chinese provinces on firms' export behavior. Her current ongoing work includes studying growth and reputation dynamics in online markets, technology transfer and knowledge spillovers among firms, and quality incentives and upgrading along supply chains. Professor Bai received her Ph.D. in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in June 2016 and spent one year at Microsoft Research New England prior to joining Harvard Kennedy School.

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2023)

Friday, September 29, 2023 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

From Kins to Comrades: Rural Clan Society and the Rise of Communism in China

A key paradox of social revolutions is that despite their radical, modernist claims, success often requires effective mobilization of the peasantry, who are typically conservative and inward-looking. This article studies how traditional institutions of rural society can help movement entrepreneurs mobilize a modern revolution. Using newly digitized data on over 54,000 family genealogies and 500,000 revolutionary martyrs from 637 uprisings nationwide, we examine the role of clan and kinship networks during the incipient stage of the Chinese Communist Revolution (1927--1936). Triple-difference estimates suggest that local organizers mobilized significantly more co-clan members to join uprisings than non-co-clans. Furthermore, we provide evidence that the characteristics of organizers’ clans and the local clan structure are among the most decisive factors in predicting uprising occurrence and outcome. These findings highlight the subtle yet significant linkage between agrarian institutions and modern revolutions and offer a new perspective on the origin of Chinese communism.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar. Lunch will be provided.

About the Speaker  
 

Junyan Jiang is the Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Professor Jiang studies comparative politics and political economy, focusing on the politics of elites, organizations, and ideas. Some of his current research projects explore the formation and transformation of political elite networks in China, the interplay between formal rules and informal power in bureaucratic systems, and the dynamics of ideology in changing societies. His work has been published in American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Development Economics, and World Politics, among others. He has received the 2020 Gregory Luebbert Article Award for the best article in comparative politics from the American Political Science Association (APSA), and honorable mentions for the 2016 Sage Paper Award for the best paper presented at APSA Annual Meetings and the 2018 Mancur Olson Award for the best dissertation in political economy.

A NOTE ON LOCATION

Please join us in-person in the Goldman Conference Room located within Encina Hall on the 4th floor of the East wing.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

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The event will be webcast live from this page.

In this event on July 5 at 6 a.m. PT / 9 a.m. ET, the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions (SCCEI) and the CSIS Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics present their latest Big Data China publication. The feature evaluates the efficacy of China’s official GDP growth data and potential alternative proxies. Based on interviews with over a dozen economists and collection of a wide assortment of data, the feature’s authors, Trustee Chair Scott Kennedy and Research Associate Maya Mei, find that although there is substantial skepticism about China’s official data, the majority of experts believe that proper analysis of China’s economic growth trajectory requires consideration of both the official data and a wide range of other metrics.

Following a brief presentation of the feature’s core findings, there will be a roundtable discussion about the pros and cons of the official data and various proxies. Panelists will include Daniel Rosen of the Rhodium Group, Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research, and Yao Yang of Peking University.

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