About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer 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 workshop 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.

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

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer 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 workshop 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.

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

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer 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 workshop 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.

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

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Acceptability and Feasibility of a Mindfulness Course for College Students in China

Speaker: Cody Abbey, PhD Candidate in Graduate School of Education, Stanford University

The college years are a crucial developmental stage during which mental conditions often emerge, including anxiety disorders and depression. Thus, it is crucial that college students have access to resources that help them develop skills for adapting to stressors and flourishing in their new environments. Unfortunately, in settings such as China, hard-to-access mental health services and a paucity of wellness courses often prevent students from receiving the support that they need. This study explores the lived experiences of undergraduates at two universities in China in a mindfulness-based program adapted for the local college student context. Specifically, this research explores three areas related to participants’ experiences: (1) how students believed their participation in the program affected their everyday life and well-being; (2) any factors that students perceived as affecting their participation; (3) recommendations for future iterations of the program. Using qualitative data from semi-structured interviews conducted with 18 of the college student participants, an applied thematic analysis was administered. This study also triangulates this data with open-ended responses from all 41 students who took the endline survey. Preliminary analyses indicate that students experienced positive psychosocial benefits from participating in the program. While they found support from the instructors and classmates facilitated their participation, time-and space-related barriers were hindrances. Recommendations include daily check-ins and reminders to practice, increasing class time dedicated to small-group discussion, and more flexible “home practice” requirements.

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer 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 workshop 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.

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

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Technology Rivalry and Resilience Under Trade Disruptions: The Case of Semiconductor Foundries

Speaker: Weiting Miao, Postdoctoral Scholar, Environmental Social Sciences, Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability

This research studies how geoeconomic fragmentation reshapes dynamic technology rivalry. Distilling key empirical features from novel data on the semiconductor foundry industry, I develop and estimate a dynamic oligopoly model of step-by-step innovation with trade disruption risk and industrial policies. In an integrated global market, firms that lag sufficiently behind the technological frontier optimally cease investing, as the step-by-step structure of innovation and persistently thin follower margins limit expected post-innovation rents. Export controls and investment restrictions alter this equilibrium. By reducing direct frontier competition and securing protected home demand, such policies can unintentionally restore innovation incentives for lagging firms, while potentially reducing spillovers and increasing innovation costs. The net effect depends on the trade-off between weaker knowledge diffusion and the rents created by protected domestic markets.

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer 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 workshop 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.

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

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Patients' Value of Physician Continuity: Evidence from China

Speaker: Yuli Xu, Postdoctoral Fellow, APARC Asia Health Policy Program, Stanford University

Continuity of medical care is widely observed, but it is often difficult to disentangle patients’ intrinsic preferences from system-imposed switching costs. Our research exploits the Chinese healthcare setting, where patients can freely choose physicians at each visit and flexibly switch across hospitals and departments, to isolate patients’ value of physician continuity. Estimating a discrete choice model, we show that patients strongly prefer to see the same physician despite minimal institutional barriers to switching, indicating an intrinsic preference for continuity. We then examine how physicians’ temporary leave affects patient behavior using a stacked difference-in-differences design. A physician’s absence leads to significant reductions in patient visits, both within the physician’s department and across other departments in the same hospital, with no substitution toward other hospitals and no detectable effects on health outcomes. Patients return to their original physicians once they resume practice. Moreover, patients with more severe conditions incur higher spending when forced to see a new physician. Overall, our findings demonstrate that patients place substantial intrinsic value on physician continuity, even in a healthcare system with highly flexible provider choice.

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer 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 workshop 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.

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

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Institutional Barriers and Venture Finance Under Export Controls: Evidence from China’s High-Tech Sectors

Speaker: Yikai Cao, PhD Candidate in Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University

Export control measures have emerged as a critical institutional shock reshaping global political and economic dynamics. While prior studies have focused on how institutions shape entrepreneurial behavior and firm-level responses, our study adopts an institutional theory lens to examine the impact of export controls and industrial policy on venture capital (VC) investment decisions. Integrating firm-level financing data with policy analysis, we find that following export controls, domestic VC funding increases significantly and concentrates in key technological fields. To isolate the causal effects of these regulatory changes, we employ a difference-in-differences approach. Our findings contribute to institutional theory by demonstrating how regulatory shocks reshape investor risk-return assessments and provide valuable insights for policymakers and investors navigating geopolitical tensions.

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer 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 workshop 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.

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

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Yes, Standing Committee: Majority Rule in Non-Democracies

Speaker: Haokun Sun, PhD candidate, Cornell University; IvyPlus Exchange Scholar, Doerr School of Sustainability

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) espouses a principle of collective leadership, in which the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) makes important decisions by consensus. However, it is not known whether such a majority rule is employed in practice. This paper studies the appointment of party cadres into positions of power as a means of uncovering a general decision-making mechanism within the CCP. We provide reduced-form results showing that appointments are decided by the PSC, who selectively promote candidates in their social networks. This motivates a novel model of collective leadership in which PSC members play a coalition game to promote their preferred candidates. The majority rule is represented by a minimum constraint on the size of winning coalitions. Estimating our model, we show that appointments to positions above the vice-provincial minister level requires support from 75\% of the PSC members on average. This cut-off varies depending on the President in power, ranging from 50\% under Deng to 80\% under Jiang and Hu. Estimating political factions using modularity clustering, we find that factional penalties operate in parallel to the majority rule. Our method can be useful for understanding decision-making in non-democracies more generally.

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer 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 workshop 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.

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

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Effectively Targeting Perinatal Home Visiting Interventions: Estimating Heterogeneous Treatment Effects on Infant Hemoglobin, Breastfeeding, and Diet Using Sorted Effects

Speaker: Siva Balakrishnan, PhD, University of Nevada, Reno

In this paper, we explore heterogenous treatment effects (HTE) of a stage-based home counseling intervention on exclusive breastfeeding (EBF), child hemoglobin and dietary diversity (DDS). In a cluster randomized controlled trial, pregnant women and caregivers of infants <6 months of age were enrolled in intervention or control arms in rural Sichuan, China. Community health workers delivered educational modules tailored to participants’ stage of development for 12 months. A novel sorted effects method was used to estimate HTE. Individual treatment effects were modeled by regressing baseline characteristics, treatment, and interactions thereof on outcomes. Characteristics of the 20% most and 20% least affected families were compared using multiple t-tests and adjusted p-values to identify those associated with HTE. Evidence of HTE on outcomes was strong with significant individual CATE on EBF and DDS among the 20% most affected families. Mothers with higher baseline caregiving knowledge or who gave birth vaginally saw greatest increases in EBF. Mothers pregnant at baseline or with less social support saw the most benefits on hemoglobin. Mothers with lower caregiving knowledge had greatest increases in DDS. The evidence supports the use of stage-based curricula and targeting mothers from pregnancy to obtain the greatest increases in child hemoglobin. To improve overall effects on EBF, breastfeeding modules may need to adjust content for first-time mothers and those with low caregiving knowledge. Partnering with hospital staff may improve EBF, particularly after c-section. Engaging family members to strengthen maternal social support may improve infant DDS.

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer 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 workshop 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.

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

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Decentralized Economic Statecraft

Speaker: Alicia Chen, PhD Candidate in Political Science, Stanford University

Economic statecraft requires countries to trade off security and economic gains. This study provides a framework to explain how China manages this dilemma by considering the allocation of Chinese foreign aid. The study documents how, unlike Western donors, Chinese aid is allocated by local politicians rather than central policymakers in Beijing, and that these politicians are subject to a competitive promotion system centered around generating economic growth and fiscal revenue. Under this incentive scheme, local politicians use foreign aid to meet economic targets at home for career advancement. The theory is tested using provincial- and contractor-level aid data and a regression discontinuity design that exploits age restrictions in China’s promotion system. The results show that promotion-eligible politicians commit nearly $20 million more in aid annually compared to their ineligible counterparts.

About the Workshops

Our Young Researcher Workshops offer 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 workshop 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.

Workshops are held on select Fridays. Lunch will be provided! 

Visit the Young Researcher Workshops webpage for more information on the content and format of the series and to learn how to sign up to present. 

Questions? Contact Ragina Johnson at raginaj@stanford.edu