Research

Journal articles, Books, Policy Reports, and Miscellaneous

My SSRN page

My academic research focuses on how political and economic institutions shape policymaking and implementation. I am working mainly on China-related topics and covering policy issues in other Asian societies. My studies use both qualitative and quantitative methods. My research aims to answer the following questions: First, how do institutional arrangements affect bureaucrats’ incentive structure in policy implementation? Second, how the administrative and fiscal capacity of bureaucracy can configure policy design and policy implementation? Third, how do individuals, such as workers, patients, or residents, respond to policy changes, given the way how the government implements the policies?

In recent years, I figured out an innovative way to answer the above questions. The Chinese government designed its social welfare system and labor-related policies when the state-owned enterprises were still dominant in the economy. Consequently, bureaucrats failed to address the needs of the workers in the informal sector or shadow economy when they designed the social welfare system in the country. The informal sector provides a testing ground on the effect of policy design and policy implementation.

Another two major areas I have been working on are social welfare system in the developmental state and health policy reforms. In these areas, to answer my research questions, I focus on a research direction highlighting the importance of the political economy, which is different from many other researchers.

Besides academic research, I am also spending enormous amounts of effort on policy-oriented research. The point of policy-oriented research is to provide readers from the government, industry, and academia a quick but in-depth analysis of relevant changes in the country.