Promotion as a Power-Building Process — Exploring the Influence Mechanisms of Managers' Promotion in Chinese Private Firms

Speaker: Yinxi Dong, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology, Tsinghua University; Visiting Ph.D. Candidate, Stanford University

This study aims to study what influences managers’ promotion in Chinese private firms. In contrast to prior studies predominantly centered on the rational decisions of entire organizations or the impact of social structural factors, this research shifts focus to CEOs’ considerations in power-building and associated promotion strategies. Using data from the China Employer-Employee Matched Survey (CEEMS) in 2017, we unveil two distinctive promotion strategies of the CEO. Promotion is the CEO’s strategy to enhance their professional power and political legitimacy. Our findings contribute a power-centered perspective to the understanding of promotions and intra-organizational power dynamics. Furthermore, they reflect how Chinese private firms’ dual systems of the institutional environment influence the leader’s power strategies and promotion decisions.
 

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. 

Escaping from Underground: Private Moneylenders in Chinese Courts

Speaker: Leo You Li, JSD Candidate at Stanford Law School

Nuancing the conventional wisdom that extralegal economic activities tend to “marginalize law” and bypass formal legal systems, we present one of the first empirical studies showing how Chinese unlicensed private moneylenders heavily use courts for debt collection. The study combines an original dataset of 66,843 court decisions in Shanghai from 2014 to 2019 with in-depth interviews with judges and lawyers. We find many private moneylenders abuse litigation to collect extralegal debts, placing judges in a trilemma between contract enforcement, financial order, and vulnerability protection. Compared with occasional lenders, moneylenders not only enjoy more legal services and litigation experience but also benefit more from these resources. Debtors facing moneylenders, however, suffer from severer hurdles of access to justice, especially lacking professional legal help that could otherwise change case outcomes. Conducting case studies on 374 lawsuits brought by three different types of moneylenders, we uncover the tactics they use in courts to evade financial regulation and the judicial approaches to balance conflicting interests. The study highlights the transformation of extralegal activities from marginalizing law to abusive litigation and reflects the role of courts in coping with such a transformation in both China and beyond.

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.

After this workshop, workshops will resume 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. 

A Vacancy Chain Perspective on the Mobilities of Chinese Bureaucrats

Speaker: Yuze Sui, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Stanford University

Job vacancy filling is a central organizational process to any organization. Despite the growing commonality and importance of external hiring in organizations, most of the organizations remain as “internal labor markets” (ILMs) (Doeringer and Piore 1971) that vacancies are filled by current employees. Vacancy filling decisions have two key characteristics. First, they come in “bundles”—filling one vacancy “opens a vacancy for another” and vacancies trickle down the “vacancy chain” until they are filled from outside or the job is abolished. Second, not all employees compete for the same vacancies that opportunities are segmented into “job clusters”. Opportunity eligibilities are influenced by overlapped institutionalized organizational boundaries—geographical regions, and departments or divisions. However, vacancy chains do cross boundaries. To reduce localism and to better enact top-down control, decision makers often laterally rotate across departments or/and geographical regions to fill vacancies. By empirically tracing the vacancy chains—a long proposed but surprisingly under-utilized empirical approach for the study of ILMs—within a large Chinese civil service bureaucracy for nearly three decades, I aim to address three interrelated questions on the mechanisms and the consequences of boundary-cross vacancy chains. 

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. 

How the Chinese Government Faces Citizen Pressure from Climate Change

Speaker: Matt DeButts, Ph.D. Candidate in Communications at Stanford University

We use a dataset of citizen petitions to estimate the effect of climate change-induced flooding on citizen petitions, using data gathered from the People's Daily message board in Henan 2021. We find that complaints increase in the wake of flooding, and that citizen discontent from flooding are both direct and place strains upon existing infrastructure. We use regression discontinuity design (RDD) to estimate the effect of floods on citizen complaints, and topic model modeling alongside logistic regression to assess correlations between floods, topics, and government response.

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. 

Family Engagement and Child Nutrition Intervention: Effects on Caregiving Practices and Child Wellbeing in Rural China

Speaker: Yunwei Chen, Ph.D. Candidate in Health Policy and Management at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Child health interventions in low-resource settings often focus on addressing the knowledge gaps of mothers or primary caregivers. However, family members may exert negative influences on the adoption of optimal household health behaviors and compromise the effectiveness of interventions and policies. We implemented a field experiment in rural China, which randomized the participation of key family influencers in a home-visiting early-life nutritional intervention. In this intervention, community health workers provided stage-based health and nutritional education to mothers and caregivers of young children through home visits with the assistance of a tablet-based mHealth system. Half of the treatment group was randomized to target only primary caregivers while the other half engaged both primary and secondary caregivers. In this talk, I will present preliminary results on whether the intervention that engaged key influencers was more effective in changing household behavior and promoting optimal feeding practices for infants and young children than the primary caregiver-only intervention.

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. 

Information Inequality in Major Choices

Speaker: Xinyao Qiu, Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at Stanford University

I study disparities in college major choices across students from different socioeconomic backgrounds and analyze their implications for intergenerational income mobility. One potential explanation for these disparities is differential access to information about majors’ academic content and personal fit. To explore the role of information frictions on major choices, I use administrative data from the centralized college application system in China. Consistent with the information inequality hypothesis, I document that students of low socioeconomic status (SES) are 21.6% (3.16 percentage points) more likely than their high-SES peers to choose majors familiar to them from their high school curricula. Further support for the information inequality hypothesis comes from an online survey experiment in which high school students report their expectations about college majors and from information spillovers among high school classmates. To discuss the economic consequences of information inequality, I calibrate a major choice model to my data and find that, because of a lack of information, low-SES students face higher mismatch rates and lower future incomes. Counterfactual analyses indicate that information interventions or affirmative action policies can effectively narrow the income gap across socioeconomic backgrounds.

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. 

The Allocative and Welfare Effects of Disrupting Supply Chains: The Case of Local Content Requirements in China

Speaker: Xiangyu Shi, Ph.D. Candidate in Economics at Yale University

Local content requirement (LCR) protects local interests and disrupts buyer-supplier chains, since it requests local firms to buy the outputs of other local firms as inputs. Hence, it affects firms' location choices, as buyer-supplier chains affect cost-effectiveness. I find that LCR shapes the spatial distribution of firm entry and exit through this mechanism. Favoritism by local career-driven leaders under economic decentralization is the driver of the effects. A novel spatial quantitative model indicates that eradicating LCR enhances welfare, by reducing mismatch between buyers and suppliers and mismatch between firms and locations.

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. 

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. 

2023 Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture
Date & Time: Thursday, September 28, 2023     |    4:30 - 6:30 PM PT 
Location: Green Library, Bing Wing, 5th floor, Bender Room

Lessons of History: The Rise and Fall of Technology in Chinese History 

Stanford Libraries and the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions are pleased to present the 2023 Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture featuring Professor Yasheng Huang who will be speaking on Lessons of History: The Rise and Fall of Technology in Chinese History.

China was once the most technologically advanced civilization in the world. Ancient Chinese achievements in technology are simply staggering. China led Europe in metallurgy, ship construction, navigation techniques, and many other fields, often by several centuries. The Chinese also invented gunpowder, paper, the water clock, the moveable printing press, and other consequential technologies way ahead of the West. For example, the Chinese invented the seismograph 1,700 years before the French.

But China’s technological development stalled, stagnated, and eventually collapsed and its early technological leadership did not set the country on a modernization path. This lecture examines the factors behind the rise and the fall of Chinese historical technology and draws lessons for today’s China.
 

Watch the Recorded Lecture

About the Speaker 
 

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Professor Yasheng Huang is the International Program Professor in Chinese Economy and Business and a professor of global economics and management at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Huang founded and runs China Lab and India Lab, which aim to help entrepreneurs in these countries improve their management skills. He is an expert source on international business, political economy, and international management. In collaboration with other scholars, Dr. Huang is conducting research on human capital formation in China and India, entrepreneurship, and ethnic and labor-intensive foreign direct investment (FDI). Prior to MIT Sloan, he held faculty positions at the University of Michigan and at Harvard Business School. Huang also served as a consultant to the World Bank.

The family of Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh donated his personal archive to the Stanford Libraries' Special Collections and endowed the Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh Memorial Lecture series to honor his legacy and to inspire future generations. Dr. Sam-Chung Hsieh (1919-2004) was former Governor of the Central Bank in Taiwan. During his tenure, he was responsible for the world's largest foreign exchange reserves, and was widely recognized for achieving stability and economic growth. In his long and distinguished career as economist and development specialist, he held key positions in multilateral institutions including the Asian Development Bank, where as founding Director, he was instrumental in advancing the green revolution and in the transformation of rural Asia. Read more about Dr. Hsieh.

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