Successful thesis defense for Xueping Sun
On Monday 13 June, Xueping successfully defended her thesis "Essays on China’s Economic Development: Innovation, Public Debt and Social Connections".
![Overview of Xueping's defense](/polopoly_fs/1.618970!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_690/image.jpg)
What is your thesis about? What are the most important findings?
- My thesis is about China’s economic development on three topics: innovation, public debt and social connections. In the chapter on innovation, I investigate the effect of bureaucrat’s incentive on innovation-led growth and find that fast promotion leads to the policy pursuit of sacrificing innovation for short-term growth. Next, in the chapter on public debt financing I study the effect of public debt financing on firms’ financing and find that bank loan and bond issuance as two public debt financing alternatives have opposite impact: while bank debt crowds out firms’ borrowing, bond issuance improved credit allocation among firms. In the last chapter I study how social connections can be used to study the spread of COVID-19 in China in the early 2020 and find that social media connections is not only a better measure of social interaction proximity but also a conduit of information compared with travel connections.
![Xueping Sun. Photo: Viktoria Garvare Mahdessian/Stockholm University](/polopoly_fs/1.618971!/image/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_690/image.jpg)
What are your plans for the near future? Any particular research agenda you will embark on?
- I will work as a Lazear-Liang postdoctoral scholar at Stanford GSB from this September. I will continue my current research on the political economy of China development. I am looking forward to resuming my work on understanding the political selection process using machine learning methods, industrial policies and how freedom and democracy matters for science. I am also interested to study the political incentives behind the zero-covid policy in China since 2020.
How do you feel now that you have successfully defended your thesis?
- It feels great! I had the best opponent I can possiblely ask for. She (Ekateria Zhuravskaya) did a great job in summarizing my dissertation and asking questions. I felt I had a much better understanding on my dissertation after the defense.
We are immensely grateful for Ekaterina Zhuravskaya's (Paris School odf Economics) time and comments as opponent at Xueping's defense!
Last updated: June 23, 2022
Source: IIES