SCCEI Seminar Series (Spring 2027)

Friday, April 2, 2027 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

About the Speaker 
 

Daniel Mattingly is Associate Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He studies the domestic and international politics of authoritarian regimes, with a focus on China. He is the author of The Art of Political Control in China (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which examines how the Chinese state controls protests and implements ambitious social policies. It was named one of the best books of 2020 by Foreign Affairs and received the best book award from the Democracy and Autocracy Section of the American Political Science Association. His current book project examines the role of the military in China’s domestic and international politics. He received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Yale University.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Winter 2027)

Friday, February 19, 2027 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

About the Speaker 
 

Nan Jia is the Capt. Henry W. Simonsen Chair in Strategic Entrepreneurship and Professor of Strategic Management at the USC Marshall School of Business.

Her research examines how firms build, sustain, and renew competitive advantage in complex institutional and technological environments. Drawing on strategic management, entrepreneurship, and organizational theory, she studies business-government relations, innovation, emerging technologies, and corporate strategy, with a particular focus on how firms navigate the intersection of markets, governments, and society. 

A major stream of her research investigates how public policies and institutional environments shape entrepreneurship, innovation, and firm strategy in both developed and emerging economies. Her work has examined how government actions influence entrepreneurial activity, technological development, innovation outcomes, and the evolution of competitive advantage. More recently, she has studied how artificial intelligence and machine learning affect productivity, creativity, decision-making, and innovation in organizations ranging from entrepreneurial ventures and startups to large established firms. She also develops machine-learning-based methods to measure and study organizational and strategic outcomes, including innovation and technological change.

In addition to her research, Nan is a leader in teaching innovation in product management. She is the co-creator and academic director of USC Marshall's Graduate Certificate in Product Management and a co-creator of the Undergraduate Minor in Product Management. Her teaching focuses on product strategy, human-AI collaboration, innovation, and data-driven decision-making.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Winter 2027)

Friday, January 15, 2027 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

About the Speaker 
 

Emma Xiaolu Zang is an Associate Professor of Sociology (with tenure) at Yale University, with secondary appointments in Biostatistics and Global Affairs. She directs the Computational Aging, Family, and Evidence Lab (Z-CAFE) and serves as the founding faculty organizer of the Yale Population Studies Speaker Series, which brings together scholars working on population and health research. Additionally, she is a non-resident fellow at the Center for China Analysis at the Asia Society Policy Institute. She has completed a Ph.D. in Public Policy in 2019 and an M.A. in Economics in 2017, both from Duke University.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2026)

Wednesday, December 2, 2026 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

About the Speaker 
 

Professor Ji Yeon (Jean) Hong is a political scientist working on the political economy of authoritarianism, with particular attention to East Asia. She is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science and Korea Foundation Chair Professor of Korean Politics at the Nam Center for Korean Studies, International Institute, University of Michigan.

Hong has various ongoing research projects related to the legacy of the authoritarian past, the long-term impact of political violence, challenges to democracy during state-building, and the determinants of elite behavior and government policies under authoritarianism. Her research has been published or is forthcoming in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Politics, and Political Science Research and Methods, among others.

She is currently serving as an associate editor for the Political Science Research and Methods. Previously, she was an Associate Professor (2020-2022) and Assistant Professor (2014-2020) at the Division of Social Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). She obtained her Ph.D. in the Department of Politics at New York University. Before NYU, she studied political science, economics (BA), and international relations (MS) at Seoul National University.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2026)

Friday, November 13, 2026 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

About the Speaker 
 

Daniel Yi Xu is the David Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Economics at Duke University, a Faculty Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research, and a Senior Fellow at the Asian Bureau of Finance and 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.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2026)

Friday, November 6, 2026 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

About the Speaker 
 

Ming Li is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Her research interests cover topics of the Chinese economy, political economy, and urban economics. Her current research focuses on industrial policy, internal migration and trade, and the political economy of firm dynamics in China. She received the Bachelor’s degree in Finance from Peking University and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2026)

Friday, October 23, 2026 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

From Free Rider to Innovator: The Rise of China’s Drug Development

This paper examines China’s transition from pharmaceutical “free rider” to global innovator over the last decade. In 2010, China accounted for less than 8% of global clinical trials; by 2020, it had surpassed the US in annual registered clinical trial volume. To study this transformation, we compile a comprehensive, synchronized database spanning the pharmaceutical drug development supply chain, covering scientific publications, clinical trials, drug development milestones for China, the U.S., and Europe, alongside drug sales and government policies over the same period. We provide strong evidence that China’s rise was primarily driven by the National Reimbursement Drug List (NRDL) reform, which dramatically expanded the effective market size for innovative drugs. We document a sharp rise in both the quantity (86% increase) and novelty of drug trials post reform, with growth concentrated in reform-exposed disease categories, first- or best-in-class drugs, and among domestic firms. A decomposition exercise reveals that the NRDL reform accounts for 43% of the growth in oncology trial activity, nearly doubling the combined contribution of upstream knowledge accumulation and talent flows (24%), while other government policies play a minor role. Finally, dynamic gains from induced innovation exceed the reform’s static gains in consumer access to innovative drugs by threefold, underscoring the importance of accounting for the reform’s long-run effects on innovation incentives in addition to near-term improvements in drug affordability.

About the Speaker 
 

Panle Jia Barwick is the Todd E. and Elizabeth H. Warnock Distinguished Chair Professor in the Department of Economics at UW-Madison. Her expertise includes Industrial Organization, Chinese Economy, Applied Microeconomics, and Applied Econometrics with a strong interest in environmental economics. Her papers have appeared in top Economic journals, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies. She is a co-founder and co-director of UW-Madison's Pan Asia Pacific Sustainability Initiative (PAPSI). She also co-founded Cornell Institute for China Economic Research (CICER) and currently serves as its board member. She is a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), associate editor for the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Rand Journal of Economics, and International Journal of Industrial Organization, and an editorial board member of Journal of Urban Economics and VoxChina.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

SCCEI Seminar Series (Fall 2026)

Friday, October 16, 2026 | 12:00 pm -1:20 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

The Demand, Supply, and Market Responses of Corporate ESG Actions: Evidence from a Nationwide Experiment in China

We conduct a nationwide field experiment on over 4,800 Chinese listed firms to study how investor ESG demand shapes corporate behavior and valuations. We randomly raise ESG concerns on public investor platforms, generating publicly observable firm-level demand shocks. Treated firms answer at length, issue more ESG reports, discuss ESG with institutional investors, and modestly improve environmental performance. Average valuations do not change, while environmental inquiries show slightly positive price patterns. Responses concentrate among productive, opaque firms, which fund ESG in part by reducing advertising expenditure. The evidence is consistent with ESG serving as a costly signal under information frictions.

About the Speaker 
 

Guojun He is an economist working on environmental, development, and governance issues. Currently, he is a professor in Economics at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He serves as the director of HKU’s ESG Research Institute and the associate director of HKU’s Institute of China Economy. He holds a concurrent appointment at the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago (EPIC) and leads research activities of its China center (EPIC-China).

He’s research tries to address some of the most challenging problems faced by developing countries and seeks to produce empirically grounded estimates for optimal policy design. The majority of his work focuses on understanding the benefits and costs of environmental policies, while he also has a broader research interest in development and governance issues.

He has won multiple academic awards, including the Zhang Pei-Gang Award for Outstanding Achievement in Development Economics (the highest award in China for development economics research) and the Gregory Chow Best Paper Award from the Chinese Economists Society. In addition, He is also a Fellow of the Asian Bureau of Financial Economic Research, an external research affiliate of the Institute of Sustainable and Green Finance at the National University of Singapore, a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, and a consultant to the Asian Development Bank, CICC Research Institute and other institutions.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

Skyline Scholars Series

Tuesday, April 14, 2026 | 12:00 pm -1:30 pm Pacific Time
Goldman Room E409, Encina Hall, 616 Jane Stanford Way

Registration for this seminar is now closed. 

Measuring Judicial Biases with Artificial Intelligence: Evidence from Chinese IP Litigations

How does judicial fairness in intellectual property (IP) litigations shape the incentives to innovate? This talk examines local bias in IP litigation and its consequences for firm-level innovation in China.

Using a dataset from China Judgements Online on Chinese IP court decisions from 2014–2020, a striking puzzle emerges: despite widespread concerns about local protectionism, non-local plaintiffs frequently win at higher rates than local ones. Two competing forces explain this — a "local protectionism effect," whereby local fiscal incentives bias courts toward local firms, and a "picket fence effect," whereby litigants anticipate bias and self-select out of bringing cases, quietly distorting the pool of disputes that reach the courtroom.

To cut through this identification challenge, researchers train an LLM–based "AI court'' on cases in which both plaintiff and defendant are non-local for which the incentives of local courts to bias either side are absent, generating counterfactual fair win-rates for all other disputes. Comparing observed and predicted win-rates reveals significant judicial bias. A 2019 reform centralizing appellate jurisdiction over a subset of IP cases, namely the technical cases, directly to the National Supreme Court shows that stronger central supervision substantially improves judicial accuracy and curtails bias — and measurably increases firm innovation.

The findings underscore that impartial courts are not just a procedural ideal, but a concrete driver of economic dynamism.

About the Speaker 
 

Professor Hanming Fang is an applied microeconomist with broad theoretical and empirical interests focusing on public economics. He is the Norman C. Grosman Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and a Skyline Scholar (April 2026) at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. His research integrates rigorous modeling with careful data analysis and has focused on the economic analysis of discrimination; insurance markets, particularly life insurance and health insurance; and health care, including Medicare. In his research on discrimination, Professor Fang has designed and implemented tests to examine the role of prejudice in racial disparities in matters involving search rates during highway stops, treatments received in emergency departments, and racial differences in parole releases. In 2008, Professor Fang was awarded the 17th Kenneth Arrow Prize by the International Health Economics Association (iHEA) for his research on the sources of advantageous selection in the Medigap insurance market.

Professor Fang is currently working on issues related to insurance markets, particularly the interaction between the health insurance reform and the labor market. He has served as co-editor for the Journal of Public Economics and International Economic Review, and associate editor in numerous journals, including the American Economic Review.

Professor Fang received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Before joining the Penn faculty, he held positions at Yale University and Duke University.  He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he served as the acting director of the Chinese Economy Working Group from 2014 to 2016. He is also a research associate of the Population Studies Center and Population Aging Research Center, and a senior fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Questions? Contact Xinmin Zhao at xinminzhao@stanford.edu
 

About the Speaker 

Chunling Lu studied international relations (BA) and political science (MA) at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and sociology (MA) and applied statistics (MS) at Syracuse University, where she also received her PhD in economics. She received postdoctoral training on health care policy analysis at the Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy, and joined the School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine in 2008 after three years as Senior Research Associate at the Harvard Institute for Global Health.

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