【AEW Webinar】International Power

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• 研討會日期 : 2025-02-20
• 時間 : 08:30
• 主講人 : Professor David Yang
• 地點 : Register and join online
• 演講者簡介 : Professor David Yang received his Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford in 2018. He is currently a Professor at Harvard University. His research interests are Behavioral Economics, Economic Development, Economic History, and Political Economy.
• 演講摘要 : An interconnected world increases economic efficiency, while providing some nations with leverage over others. We investigate international power stemming from trade. We first write an illustrative model of trade with possibilities of international disputes, highlighting key features of how nations can exert coercive power toward one another through trade. The model yields a measure of international power, which we operationalize across nation-pairs over the past 20 years. Using this measure, we examine the consequences and causes of international power. We compile comprehensive data on bilateral engagement events, and we develop a high-frequency measure of bilateral geopolitical relationships. We show two main empirical results. First, increases in international power between countries --- which raise the credibility of threats of trade disruptions --- induce more bilateral engagement and negotiations. Second, worsened geopolitical relationships --- in anticipation of future disputes --- prompt nations to build up greater international power through changes in trade activities.
• Working Paper Title : Communities of Commerce: The Economic Legacy of Chinese Immigration in Java
• Working Paper Speaker : Professor Gedeon Lim
• Working Paper Speaker Biography : Professor Gedeon Lim received his Ph.D. in Economics from Boston University in 2020. He is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests are Development, Political Economy, and Economic History.
• Working Paper Abstract : Ethnic minorities have played an out-sized role in both historical and contemporary economic development. This paper studies one of the most prominent but understudied cases, in the world’s most populous island: the economic legacy of ethnic Chinese immigration on Java, Indonesia in the early 21st century. Using an instrumental variables strategy, we exploit plausibly arbitrary 15th-century ethnic Chinese landing sites on the Northern coast of Java that determined initial Chinese presence but have not been accessible by sea since the mid 17th-century due to silting. We find a strong positive effect on local economic development. In districts with higher ethnic Chinese shares, villages are wealthier as measured by consumption, population density and nighttime light intensity. We trace this to the persistently important economic role of Chinese in trade and commerce. Districts with a historically higher ethnic Chinese share have, today, a higher (lower) employment share in services (agriculture), firms have higher sales and these positive effects can be traced to a larger financial industry. Furthermore, we find that sub-sectors more closely linked to traditional ethnic Chinese sectors continue to employ a larger share of individuals. Our findings suggest that the ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia, despite their small size, have and continue to play an out-sized role in Indonesia’s modern-day development with spillovers that benefit the entire local population.