【Past Event】Structural Estimation Methods in Development Economics and Political Economics

Time: 7th December, 2017 (Thursday) 18:00-20:30 pm

Venue: 734 Room, Mingde Main Hall, RUC

Speakers:

Hu Lin Assistant Professor at Australian National University

Li Kun Assistant Professor at Australian National University

Moderator:

Jiang Ting Research Fellow at NADS, Lecturer at School of Economics, RUC

Background:

There has long been a debate between reduction methods and structural methods in positivist research which oriented by causal inference. In order to assess or design policies more scientifically, researchers in both development Economics and political economics pay more attention to the effectiveness of theoretical models, the data structure as well as the synergy effect and equilibrium effect of the policy. Under the circumstance, this lecture aims to discuss the practical visions of structural estimation methods.

Abstract:

The first part of the lecture will focus on how a parliamentary democracy constitutes its government based on the method of maximum likelihood. Under the parliamentary democracy system, the constitution of government (size and ideology diversity) interacts to the result of government (duration and policy positions), and they both have been constrained by rules of policy. The speaker’s latest study on stochastic negotiation game model uses 200 governments’ data collected from 7 parliamentary democracies in Western Europe in the duration of 45 years to assess the model’s structure and provide insights for policy revolution based on counterfactual tests.

The second part will turn to the assessment of Chinese ownership reforms’ general performance using generalized method of moments. Although the ownership reform may improve business practices of enterprises and promote the effective allocation of elements, recognizing enterprises’ producing technology and their distortion degree would be hard in policy assessment. In this sense, the study has first built up a discrete-time dynamic investment model and estimated the structure of it on the basis of the data collected from Chinese industrial enterprises database from 1998 to 2007. After counterfactual tests, the study found out that the contribution of ownership revolution to economic growth mainly derived from the improvement of the productivity of all elements in enterprises rather than from the decreasing distortion degree in resource allocation.

About Speakers:

Hu Lin earned Ph.D. in Economics from Arizona State University, M.Phil. in Economics from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and B.A. and B.Sc. in Wuhan University. She used to work as a postdoc research fellow at Washington University in St. Louis and is now an Assistant Professor at Australian National University.

Li Kun obtained a Ph.D. from Toulouse School of Economics and earned M.Phil. in Economics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, M.Sc. in Economics from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and B.Eng. in Automation from the Central South University of China.