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.

Please register for the event to receive email updates and add it to your calendar.

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.

Interested in meeting with Professor Wang one-on-one? 
Sign up to speak with him during his office hours: 
Select Tuesdays | 2:00-3:30 PM 

Please schedule a meeting in advance and use your Stanford email to log in. 

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

Skyline Scholars Seminar Series

Tuesday, February 4, 2025 | 1:00 pm -2:30 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

The Anatomy of Chinese Innovation: Insights on Patent Quality and Ownership

In this study we look at the evolution of patenting in China from 1985-2019. We develop a new method to measure the importance of an individual patent for innovation based on the use of a Large Language Model to process patent text data and a new theory of the innovation process. We also classify patent ownership using a comprehensive business registry. We highlight three insights. First, patents that are important for innovation have become less important on average. Second, knowledge within China has become more important than knowledge outside of China for directing innovation in China. Finally, knowledge produced by Chinese entities within China has become more important than knowledge produced by foreign entities.

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About the Speaker 
 

Loren Brandt is the Noranda Chair Professor of Economics at the University of Toronto specializing in the Chinese economy. He is also a research fellow at the IZA (The Institute for the Study of Labor) in Bonn, Germany. He has published widely on the Chinese economy in leading economic journals and been involved in extensive household and enterprise survey work in both China and Vietnam. With Thomas Rawski, he completed Policy, Regulation, and Innovation in China’s Electricity and Telecom Industries (Cambridge University Press, 2019), an interdisciplinary effort analyzing the effect of government policy on the power and telecom sectors in China. He was also co-editor and major contributor to China’s Great Economic Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which provides an integrated analysis of China’s unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. Brandt was also one of the area editors for Oxford University Press’ five-volume Encyclopedia of Economic History (2003). His current research focuses on issues of entrepreneurship and firm dynamics, industrial policy and innovation and  economic growth and structural change.

Interested in meeting with Professor Brandt one-on-one? 
Sign up to speak with him during his office hours: 
Wednesday, 1/29 or 2/12 | 2:00-5:00 PM 

Please schedule a meeting in advance and use your Stanford email to log in. 

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Winter 2025)

Friday, February 7, 2025 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Homemade Foreign Trading: Insider Evasion in China’s Stock Connect Program

Using cross-border holding data from all custodians—financial institutions that safeguard and manage assets—in China’s Stock Connect program, we provide evidence that Chinese mainland insiders evaded see-through surveillance, a tracking mechanism to monitor the true beneficiaries of financial transactions, by engaging in round-tripping trades that disguise domestic capital as foreign investments. Following the 2018 regulatory reform of Northbound Investor Identification, which enhanced regulatory oversight and identification of investors, the correlation between insider trading and northbound flows—capital moving from offshore markets into mainland-listed stocks—weakens. Additionally, the reform reduced the return predictability of these flows, meaning that insider activity within northbound flows no longer strongly predicts future stock performance. This reduction in return predictability is particularly pronounced among less prestigious foreign custodians and cross-operating mainland custodians, who were more commonly used by mainland insiders to conceal their activities. Our analysis highlights the critical role of regulatory cooperation in managing capital market integration and addressing cross-border regulatory arbitrage.

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

About the Speaker 
 

Professor Zhiguo He is the James Irvin Miller Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He is a financial economist whose expertise covers financial markets, financial institutions, and macroeconomics broadly. He is also conducting academic research on Chinese financial markets, and writing academic articles on new progress in the area of cryptocurrency and blockchains. Before joining Stanford GSB, he was on the faculty of Chicago Booth from 2008 to 2023, where he received tenure in 2015 and led Becker Friedman Institute China from 2020 to 2023.

His research has been published in leading academic journals in finance and economics. After serving as associate editors for several leading academic journals, He served as the guest editor of the Review of Finance ”Special Issue on China” and currently serves as the editor of the Review of Asset Pricing Studies.

Professor He received his bachelor and master degrees from the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University before receiving his PhD from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2008. 

 

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 2025)

Friday, February 28, 2025 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Firm Selection and Growth in Carbon Offset Markets: Evidence from the Clean Development Mechanism in China

Carbon offsets could reduce the global costs of carbon abatement, but there is little evidence on whether they truly reduce emissions. We study carbon offsets sold by manufacturing firms in China under the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). We find that offset-selling firms increase carbon emissions by 49% in the four years after starting an offset project, relative to a matched sample of non-applicants. We explain this increase in emissions by jointly modeling the firm decision to propose an offset project and the UN’s decision of whether to approve. In estimates of our model, CDM firms increase emissions due to both the selection of higher-growth firms into project investment (40 pp of the total) and the causal effect of higher efficiency, post-investment, on firm scale and therefore emissions (9 pp).

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

About the Speaker 
 

Daniel Yi Xu is a Professor of Economics at Duke University and a Faculty Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on the intersection of productivity, international trade, and industrial organization. Professor Xu’s current research agenda involves the use of large-scale microdata to model and estimate a broad range of dynamic individual firm decisions and to examine how these decisions impact resource allocation, industry performance, and economic growth, particularly in developing and emerging economies.

His most recent work has been published in leading economics journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, RAND Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Dynamics, and Management Science. Professor Xu is currently a co-editor of the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics and an associate editor of the RAND Journal of Economics. He previously served as co-editor for the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Development Economics. Additionally, he has been an associate editor for the American Economic Journal: Applied, Economic Journal, Journal of Industrial Economics, Journal of International Economics, Quantitative Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics.
 

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 2025)

Friday, January 17, 2025 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Effects of Referring Business Partners on Firm Networks and Performance

Firms often struggle to find and connect with suitable suppliers and clients, hindering growth and industrial development.  We surveyed 700 Chinese brush pen industry firms to understand their supplier-client networks and implemented a targeted referral program to address these barriers. The program introduced four treatment groups: screened referrals between likely compatible firms with a subsidy for the first transaction, random referrals with a subsidy for the first transaction, screened referrals without a subsidy, and control where firms were observed but received no referrals. We found that screened referrals with subsidies significantly increased subsequent transactions while partially crowding out prior partnerships; information-only referrals showed no impact. The referrals increase revenue, profit, and work hours among suppliers and growth-oriented clients. Suppliers upgraded product quality, while clients expanded product variety into higher-quality offerings, indicating complementary improvements within the supply chain. The intervention also shifted firms’ beliefs about the value of partnerships, spurring increased search efforts and forming additional non-referred partnerships, suggesting pessimistic beliefs as a critical friction in firm-to-firm access. Overall, the referrals yielded substantial private and social returns, underscoring the potential of targeted matchmaking interventions to drive industrial development.

Preview Prof. Cai’s research in a recent VoxChina article on Firm-to-Firm Referrals.

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

About the Speaker 
 

Jing Cai is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. She received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2012. Her research areas are development economics and household finance. Her current research examines the growth of micro-enterprises and SMEs, impacts of tax incentives on firm behavior, and diffusion and impacts of financial innovations in developing countries. Dr. Cai is a Co-Chair of the firm sector of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a fellow of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). She currently serves as an associate editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, and the Economic Development and Cultural Change.

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 2024)

Friday, November 22, 2024 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Response to Competition: Gender, Domains, and STEM Choice
 

Women’s lower performance in competitive environments has been advanced as an explanation for gender inequalities in the labor market. Using broadly representative Chinese administrative data, and measuring response to competition (RC) by performance changes from a mock exam to the competitive High School Entrance Exam, we document higher RC for boys in STEM and for girls in non-STEM subjects, with the male STEM RC advantage weakened by random exposure to high-performing female classmates in STEM. Both domain-specific RC measures significantly predict subsequent STEM track choice, accounting for 26% of the adjusted gender gap in STEM specialization, a known precursor to the gender pay gap.

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

About the Speaker 
 

Jane Zhang is an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales and a Visiting Scholar (2024-25) at the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions. Her research examines how preferences and beliefs are shaped by policy, how they interact with incentives, and the role that they play in determining a wide-range of social outcomes. Her approach combines the use of tools from the experimental economics field, with the exploitation of natural experiments, field experiments, and controlled lab manipulations to make causal inferences about the determinants of preferences and beliefs. Her work has been published in outlets such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review: Insights, the Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She received her PhD in Economics from U.C. Berkeley and BA in Economics from Stanford University.

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
 

The Fallacy of the China Model and its Long-term Consequences: A Roundtable Discussion 

Yasheng Huang, Skyline Scholar and MIT Professor of Global Economics and Management

This talk draws on Professor Yasheng Huang’s recently completed book manuscript, Statism with Chinese Characteristics: From Directional Liberalism to the China Model—A History of China’s Reforms and Reversals (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). Based on detailed archival research and rare databases in the 1980s, he shows that China's healthiest and most inclusive growth took place during the most politically liberal period. The China Model, which asserts that autocracy and statist finance created the Chinese growth miracle, gets many facts wrong and gets causal order backward. But the China Model is the prevailing economic thinking in China, and it is the root cause of many problems in the Chinese economy today.  

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

About the Speaker 
 

Yasheng Huang is a Professor and holds the Epoch Foundation Professorship of Global Economics and Management at MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2013 to 2017, he served as an Associate Dean in charge of MIT Sloan’s Global Partnership programs and its Action Learning initiatives. His previous appointments include faculty positions at the University of Michigan and at Harvard Business School.

Professor Huang is the author of 11 books and counting in both English and Chinese He is currently involved in research projects in three broad areas: 1) political economy of contemporary China, 2) historical technological and political developments in China, and 3) as a co-PI in “Food Safety in China: A Systematic Risk Management Approach” (supported by Walmart Foundation, 2016). He has published numerous articles in academic journals and in media outlets.

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 2024)

Friday, October 25, 2024 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Small Yard, High Fence? The Impact of US-China Tensions on the Reallocation of International Students in US Higher Education

Authors: Keng-Chi Chang, Ruixue Jia, Steven Liao, Margaret E. Roberts

One of the most critical recent developments in the global economy is how U.S.-China tensions are reshaping cross-border economic integration. To date, however, our understanding of its impact has been mainly limited to international trade and finance, as opposed to migration. To fill this gap, we explore the effect of recent tensions on international student flows to the United States that are critical to U.S. higher education, knowledge production, and the broader economy. We construct a unique granular dataset that combines the universe of international students in the United States from 2000--2021 with specific information about their institution and novel measures of the sensitivity of students' study fields. Using a series of difference-in-differences and triple-differences designs, we find that tensions have not had a uniform effect on students across states, institutions and fields of study.  Instead, we show that tensions have shifted international students from China toward private institutions in blue states, and away from sensitive fields, particularly at the PhD level. The findings reveal new patterns of uneven international student decline in recent years and extend policy debates on technology security and export controls to cross-border human capital barriers.

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

About the Speaker 
 

Margaret Roberts is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at the University of California, San Diego. Her research interests lie in the intersection of political methodology and the politics of information, with a specific focus on methods of automated content analysis and the politics of censorship in China. Much of her research uses social media, online experiments, and large collections of texts to understand the influence of censorship and propaganda on access to information and beliefs about politics.

She received a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University, and a M.S. in statistics and a B.A. in international relations and economics from Stanford University.

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 2024)

Friday, October 11, 2024 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Longevity of Power: Does Rank Influence Lifespan among Chinese Political Elites?

This paper investigates the relationship between power and longevity among Chinese Communist Party elites. Using a unique dataset of 2,223 members of the Central Committee and Alternate Central Committee from 1921 to 2022, this study explores whether higher-ranking officials enjoy longer lifespans and are less likely to experience unnatural deaths. By relying on original data on the causes and years of death for these political figures, the analysis provides new insights into the survival advantages conferred by power within an autocratic regime. The findings have significant implications for understanding the dynamics of leadership stability and regime durability in authoritarian contexts.

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

About the Speaker 
 

Professor Yuhua Wang is Professor of Government at Harvard University. He is the author of Tying the Autocrat’s Hands (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Rise and Fall of Imperial China (Princeton University Press, 2022). The Rise and Fall of Imperial China won the 2023 Lubbert Best Book Award in Comparative Politics from the American Political Science Association. His articles have appeared in American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, and China Quarterly. Yuhua received his B.A. from Peking University and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
 

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
 

A Special Lecture with Professor Hui Qin
 

中西思想交流中的"问题错位"
Misalignment in the Exchange of Ideas between China and the West

Tuesday, November 7, 2023 | 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm Pacific Time
William J. Perry Room C231, Encina Hall Central, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Please join us for a conversation with Professor Hui Qin. The lecture will be held primarily in Chinese, translation services will not be available. 

About the Speaker 
 

Professor Qin Hui (秦晖) is an economic historian best known for his work on peasant studies and an influential public intellectual.  He retired as Professor of History, Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, in 2017 and then served as a Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Qin’s academic research is focused on land ownership and peasant wars and, in the last two decades, he has written on many different aspects of China’s rural economy. As a leading figure in rural studies, Qin’s acerbic comments on a wide range of social issues, particularly those concerning  China’s rural population and migrant workers, have earned him many fans. He is a sought-after media commentator in print, on TV and online.

Questions? Contact Alexis Medina at amedina5@stanford.edu