CCER Seminar Packed with Groundbreaking Research

Jul 30-2022   

China Center for Economic Research (CCER) held its sixth summer seminar from July 2 to 4. Over 100 researchers from China and abroad joined the four parallel meetings to share their cutting-edge research on topics ranging from industry, macro-economy, finance, and international economics, to labor and healthcare, development and politics, and environment and public policy. Prof. Yao Yang, Dean of the NSD, made the opening speech.

On the first day, Prof. Dirk Krueger of the University of Pennsylvania delivered a keynote speech on governments’ COVID preventive policy analyzed in a framework combining SIR model for epidemics and a macro model. In the short term, governments must balance the economy and people’s health; in the long run, the policy to close down schools will negatively affect human capital, said Prof. Krueger.

On July 4, Prof. Daniel Trefler of University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management gave his keynote speech, Looking Backward, Innovation Forward: A Theory of Competitive Cascades. Aiming to dissect the relationships between trade and innovation, his modeling shows that reduction in higher order competition facilitates corporate innovation, while decrease in lower order competition has the opposite result; both effects become more evident as export probability goes up. He used the data of Chinese firms to verify the models and consistency between the two was established.

Each discipline saw the presentation of three to seven research papers, with some delivered at Chengze Garden, the physical venue of the seminar, and others online. The success of the seminar was duly reflected in the participants’ enthusiasm for the next gathering.

CCER, set up in the early 1990s and long acclaimed for its research into a wide array of China’s economic and social challenges, is the fountainhead of BiMBA Business School by offering unparalleled academic support to its MBA and executive education programs.