Early-life Experience of Social Violence and CEOs’ Risk-taking Attitudes

Speaker: Cindy Shen, Predoctoral Research Fellow, Stanford Graduate School of Business

We show that early-life experience of social violence exerts a lasting influence on CEO’s risk-taking attitudes, in the context of their corporate acquisition decisions. Utilizing the Cultural Revolution as a rare social experiment, we document that, CEOs experienced higher level social violence in early-life are less likely to engage in acquisition and the impact is larger for riskier type of acquisition. Further analyses show that the early-life social violence experience takes effect by affecting people’s mental health. Given that our treatment is distinct from the events in prior studies (e.g., natural disaster or economic degression), this study enriches our understanding on the origin of managerial risk-taking incentives.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Thursday from 1 - 2 pm. Afternoon refreshments 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. 

Cross-border Impacts: How China’s College Expansion Contributes to America’s Graduate Programs

Speaker: Yuli Xu, Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at UC San Diego

China’s annual college enrollment has experienced a significant surge, increasing over nine fold from 1 million in 1998 to more than 9.6 million in 2020 due to a massive expansion initiated in 1999. This paper studies the impact of this expansion on US graduate programs by combining administrative data on Chinese college admission with the SEVIS database on foreign students. Our identification strategy leverages city-year-major variation driven by China's college expansion guided by a quota system, which allows us to control for city-year and major-year confounders. Our estimates imply that the college expansion in China can explain 30% of the rise in Chinese graduate student flow to the US during 2003-2015.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Tuesday from 2 - 3 pm. Afternoon refreshments 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. 

Performative Propaganda Engagement: How Online Celebrity Fandom Engages with State Propaganda in China

Speaker: Yingdan Lu, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication

Established research on authoritarian information control has extensively examined the top-down dissemination of political propaganda and its impact on public attitudes and behaviors. This research introduces a novel theory, performative propaganda engagement, which focuses on individuals who engage with state propaganda in a performative manner to benefit an individual or a group they align with, rather than genuinely endorsing or promoting the propaganda. Through mixed methods research approaches, this research empirically investigates performative propaganda engagement within the realm of Chinese online celebrity fandom, a rising cultural force on Chinese social media. The findings reveal that celebrity fans in China actively incorporate the promotion of state propaganda into their daily activities, aiming to enhance the visibility and reputation for their beloved celebrities. I theorize that celebrity fans performatively engage with state propaganda through three mechanisms — celebrity mobilization, direct state mobilization, and algorithmic visibility manipulation. By exploring the manifestations of performative propaganda engagement, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the downstream effects of authoritarian information control, the contemporary fandom culture in China, the metrics-driven nature of social media ecosystem, and the authoritarian resilience in the digital age.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Tuesday from 2 - 3 pm. Afternoon refreshments 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. 

The Double-Edged Effect of Internet Control on Productivity and Innovation: Evidence from China

Speaker: Meicen Sun, Postdoctoral Scholar, Program on Democracy and the Internet (PDI)

This paper advances a new theory on the double-edged effect of Internet control, where it benefits domestic data-intensive firms and hurts domestic knowledge-intensive research entities. Exploiting a major Internet control shock in 2014, this paper finds that Chinese data-intensive firms gained from Internet control a 10% increase in revenue over other Chinese firms, and about 1-2% over their U.S. competitors. The same shock incurred an up to 25% reduction in research quality for researchers conditional on the knowledge-intensity of their discipline. While Internet control takes a toll on the country’s long-term capacity for innovation, it lends a short-term benefit to the country’s data-intensive sectors. Conventional wisdom on the inherent limit to cross-border information control by autocracies overlooks this crucial protectionist benefit that enhances autocratic resilience in the digital age.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Tuesday from 2 - 3 pm. Afternoon refreshments 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. 

The Digital Dictator's Dilemma 

Speaker: Eddie Yang, Visiting Graduate Student Researcher, Political Science

An emerging literature suggests that Artificial Intelligence is well suited for autocrats to automate authoritarian control. This paper argues that AI's ability to do so may be hampered by the very repressive institutions that produced it. Drawing on the classic theory of the dictator's dilemma, I argue that AI can suffer from a similar repression-information trade-off - as the regime becomes more repressive, there is less (politically relevant) information in the data for AI to learn. I illustrate this argument using a unique dataset on censorship in China. I show that AI's ability to censor decreases with higher pre-existing censorship. The drop in AI's performance is larger during times of crisis, when people reveal their true preferences. I further show that this problem cannot be easily fixed with more data. Ironically, however, the existence of the free world can help boost AI's ability to censor.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Tuesday from 2 - 3 pm. Afternoon refreshments 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. 

Adaptive Versus Non-adaptive EdTech: Evidence from a Large-Scale RCT in Rural China

Speaker: Yue Ma, Social Science Research Scholar, Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions

EdTech, which includes online education, computer assisted learning (CAL), and remote instruction, has expanded rapidly in the last decade. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, the role of adaptive programs that can tailor learning experiences to individual users have received more attention than ever. Despite the popularity of these programs, however, rigorous, large-scale studies of their effectiveness do not exist. In this study, we examine whether the adaptive learning features of a CAL program are effective in improving student achievement in a developing setting. We analyze data from a field experiment of 8,647 students from 105 primary schools in rural China. Our empirical results show that neither adaptive nor non-adaptive CAL has an effect on student math scores. When we isolate the adaptive learning feature impact of CAL (versus non-adaptive CAL), we find null effects overall. Moreover, while non-adaptive CAL does have a small impact on the scores of mid-tercile students, adaptive CAL has no impact on the scores of students in any tercile. Interview findings suggest that outdated hardware, heavy teacher workloads, low student interest, and curriculum outpacing effects, among other factors, may explain the null effects of both adaptive and non-adaptive CAL. These results suggest that, in under-resourced contexts where these obstacles exist, both non-adaptive and adaptive Edtech may be ineffective learning tools, which has important implications for the continued, rapid expansion of EdTech throughout the world.

About the Workshops

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Tuesday from 2 - 3 pm. Afternoon refreshments 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

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Tuesday from 2 - 3 pm. Afternoon refreshments 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

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Tuesday from 2 - 3 pm. Afternoon refreshments 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

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Tuesday from 2 - 3 pm. Afternoon refreshments 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

The SCCEI Young Researcher Workshops are a bi-weekly series of presentations from scholars around campus who are working on issues related to China’s economy and institutions. The aim of the series is to bring together young scholars by providing a platform to present new research, get feedback, exchange ideas, and make connections. Each session features a single presenter who may present a new research plan, share results from preliminary data analyses, or do a trial run of a job talk or conference presentation. The Workshop Series is an opportunity to give and receive feedback on existing research, get to know other researchers around campus who are working on or in China, and be a testing ground for new ideas, data, and presentations.

Workshops are held every other Tuesday from 2 - 3 pm. Afternoon refreshments 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.