Amid groundbreaking political reforms and the largest mass migration in human history, China created over 3,800 new towns to house its burgeoning urban population and sustain rapid economic growth. Driven by marketization, global trade, inter-city competition, and an exponentially growing real estate industry, this continuous urban expansion represents the most extensive urbanization initiative in history. Contemporary Chinese new towns have emerged as a national campaign to reimagine the Chinese city and reshape the global geo-economic landscape. This talk examines four decades of Chinese urbanization through the lens of urbanism and utopianism. Case studies—including the Suzhou Industrial Park, Shanghai's One City and Nine Towns, and prototypical eco-cities—illuminates fundamental issues of economic vitality, cultural identity, environmental sustainability, and socio-spatial dynamics. Ultimately, the talk explores the complex interplay between space production and social transformation within the context of neoliberalism and globalization.

Speaker: Zhongjie “Jeffrey” Lin is Benjamin Lin Presidential Professor of Urban Design at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, where he serves as Head of the Urban Design program and directs the Future Cities Initiative. An internationally renowned expert in urban planning and design, Dr. Lin has published numerous books on Asian architecture and cities, including Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan (2010/2023), Vertical Urbanism: Designing Compact Cities in China (2018), and Constructing Utopias: China’s New Town Movement in the 21st Century (2025). He was the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Abe Fellowship, and three Graham Foundation awards.

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Paper 1 : Optimal Payment Levels for Reference-Dependent Physicians

Abstract: Prospective payment policies, which set a fixed payment for a bundle of services regardless of providers’ actual costs, are widely used across sectors. However, when the fixed payment level deviates from providers’ familiar, preexisting revenue, the introduction of such policies may induce behavioral distortions if providers exhibit reference-dependent preferences. This study investigates the optimal payment level under this policy by leveraging the healthcare context. We develop a collective model of medical decision-making and incorporate physicians’ reference-dependent preferences into this collective framework. Our structural estimates reveal that both patients and physicians play active roles in medical decisions, with physicians placing 3.5 times more weight on perceived losses than gains. The fixed payment level, by shaping physicians’ perceptions of gains and losses, crucially affects both treatment and welfare outcomes. Through welfare analysis, we derive the optimal payment level that reduces healthcare expense while maintaining patient health benefits.

Speaker:
Wei Yan is an Assistant Professor at the School of Finance, Renmin University of China. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the National University of Singapore. Her research in health economics studies the interactions among healthcare providers, patients, and insurers, with a focus on understanding how differing incentive structures and information asymmetries between these key players affect their decisions and generate inefficiencies in healthcare markets.

Paper 2: Fear and Risk Perception: Understanding Physicians' Dynamic Responses to Malpractice Lawsuits

Abstract: Using linked health insurance claims and malpractice lawsuit records from a Chinese city, we study how lawsuits shape physicians’ behavior. After lawsuits, physicians practice more defensively—rejecting high-risk patients, reducing surgeries, and increasing diagnostic tests and traditional Chinese medicine—without improving outcomes. The effects spread to unaffected departments and fade in eight weeks. Evidence suggests psychological rather than financial drivers: similar responses regardless of hospitals’ prior exposure or litigation outcomes; reactions to patient deaths vary with the recency of the lawsuit; and responses intensify after violent incidents against physicians. Overall, lawsuits trigger short-lived, fear-driven defensive medicine.

Speaker: 
Jia Xiang is Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Penn State in 2020. She was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard School of Public Health from 2020 to 2021. Her areas of expertise include Industrial Organization, Health Economics, and Applied Microeconomics. Her work has been published in The Rand Journal of Economics.

This talk examines how age and generational differences shape smartphone adoption patterns in South Korea, one of the world's most rapidly aging societies. Using discrete-time hazard models, the analysis investigates whether digital divides reflect temporary life stage effects or persistent generational differences that accompany cohorts throughout their lives. Preliminary results reveal striking heterogeneity both across and within age cohorts, suggesting that neither age nor cohort membership alone fully explains adoption patterns. Motivated by these findings, the talk concludes by introducing an age-period-cohort framework designed to separate the distinct effects of aging, different formative experiences (cohort effect), and changing environment (period effect) on technology adoption.

Speaker:

Jinseok Kim is a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL). His research examines economic decision-making and technology adoption through the lens of behavioral and applied microeconomics. Using econometric modeling and experimental approaches, he studies consumer behavior, innovation diffusion, and the interaction between policy, markets, and demographic change. His work contributes to understanding how psychological factors and institutional contexts shape economic choices and the adoption of new technologies.

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Continuity of medical care is widely observed, but it is often difficult to disentangle patients’ intrinsic preferences from system-imposed switching costs. In this webinar, Dr. Yuli Xu discusses a study that uses the Chinese healthcare setting, where patients can freely choose physicians at each visit and flexibly switch across hospitals and departments, to isolate patients’ value of physician continuity.

Estimating a discrete choice model, the study shows that patients strongly prefer to see the same physician despite minimal institutional barriers to switching, indicating an intrinsic preference for continuity. The study also examines how physicians’ temporary leave affects patient behavior, using a stacked difference-in-differences design. A physician’s absence leads to significant reductions in patient visits, both within the physician’s department and across other departments in the same hospital, with no substitution toward other hospitals and no detectable effects on health outcomes. Patients return to their original physicians once they resume practice. Moreover, patients with more severe conditions incur higher spending when forced to see a new physician. Overall, the findings demonstrate that patients place substantial intrinsic value on physician continuity, even in a healthcare system with highly flexible provider choice.

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Yuli Xu joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2025-2026 academic year. She recently obtained her Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on Labor and Health Economics, with particular interests in how female labor force participation and fertility decisions are influenced by labor market institutions and past birth experiences. In her thesis, "Gendered Impacts of Privatization: A Life Cycle Perspective from China," she demonstrates that the reduction in public sector employment has widened the gender gap in the labor market while narrowing the gender gap in educational attainment. She also finds that this structural shift has delayed marriage among younger generations.

In another line of research, Yuli examines the effects of maternity ward overcrowding. She finds that overcrowding reduces the use of medical procedures during childbirth without negatively impacting maternal or infant health. While it has no direct effect on subsequent fertility, she shows that mothers, especially those with a college degree, are more likely to switch to another hospital for subsequent births after experiencing overcrowding. During her time at APARC, Yuli will further investigate patient-physician relationships in the Chinese healthcare system, where patients have considerable flexibility in choosing their doctors at each visit. She will explore the persistence of these relationships and examine how patients respond when their regular doctors are temporarily unavailable.

Yuli also holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of International Business and Economics in China.

In February 2024, the South Korean government announced an expansion of medical school enrollment by 2,000 students to address physician shortages, prompting widespread opposition from the medical community. On February 19, 2024, over 90% of trainee doctors—representing approximately one-third of physicians at major teaching hospitals—resigned and launched a nationwide walkout that lasted until August 2025. This 18-month walkout constituted a major workforce shock in a universal, single-payer system and created a rare opportunity to evaluate effects on mortality, health care use, and spending. Hear from Prof. Park as he presents the results of a study on the impacts of the walkout.

Using a difference‑in‑differences design, the findings reveal significant increases in 30‑day and 90‑day in‑hospital mortality and in weekly all‑cause mortality. Health care utilization declined across inpatient and outpatient settings, with a greater relative reduction in hospital admissions. Hospitalizations dropped primarily for simple and general conditions, whereas admissions for complex conditions remained stable. Mean spending per hospitalization rose substantially, and spending per outpatient visit increased modestly. There was little evidence of systematic substitution of care from teaching hospitals to non‑teaching facilities or primary care settings. Overall, the nationwide trainee doctor walkout in South Korea was associated with higher mortality and lower health care utilization. These findings underscore the vulnerability of health systems to workforce disruptions and highlight the need for policies that strengthen staffing resilience, contingency planning, and communication mechanisms between the government and the medical workforce.

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Sungchul Park is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Korea University (Republic of Korea). He previously held tenure-track faculty positions at Drexel University (United States) and Ewha Womans University (Republic of Korea). As a health economist and health services researcher, he studies how to design better health care systems that deliver high-quality care at a reasonable cost while ensuring equitable access. His research evaluates the value of health care by assessing both costs and patient and population health outcomes and investigates payment and care delivery reforms, with an emphasis on value-based care. He also analyzes how emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and digital health, affect cost, quality, access, and efficiency in health care. In addition, he compares health system performance across high-income countries, particularly OECD members, to identify policies that improve care and well-being.

Beneath Xi Jinping’s grand slogans of a “Chinese dream” and a “shared future for humankind,” there are internal tensions, debates, and competing interests that continue to shape China’s approach to the world. Through the lens of domestic politics, nationalism, and regime insecurity in China, Weiss will examine the evolving and contested landscape of what “China” wants. The talk will conclude with policy implications for the United States, prospects for peaceful coexistence, and the future of international order.

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Jessica Chen Weiss is the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and the inaugural faculty director of the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at SAIS. From August 2021 to July 2022, she served as senior advisor to the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department on a Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars (IAF-TIRS). Weiss is the author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (Oxford University Press, 2014). Her research appears in International Organization, China Quarterly, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, and Review of International Political Economy. With commentary in the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Los Angeles Times, and the Ezra Klein show, Weiss was profiled by the New Yorker and named one of Prospect Magazine's Top Thinkers for 2024. Weiss is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis and previously the Michael J. Zak Professor for China and Asia-Pacific Studies at Cornell University and an assistant professor at Yale University. She founded FACES, the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford University. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, she received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego.

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This talk examines how gender and gender inequality shape global talent migration, with a focus on flows to the United States. Conceptualizing gender as both an individual attribute and a structural condition, An shows how macro-level inequalities and micro-level aspirations jointly organize migration pathways. Using South Korea as a case study, the analysis demonstrates that women migrating to the U.S. are more educationally selective than men, suggesting that gender inequality drives women's talents abroad. The talk also introduces comparative work on Korea and Taiwan that investigates gendered return patterns among U.S.-trained PhDs.

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Minyoung An is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL). Her research investigates how gender shapes global talent flows and the career trajectories of highly skilled workers. Using large-scale datasets and mixed methods, she examines educational selectivity, gendered return migration, and transnational academic linkages. Her work advances understanding of how gender inequality structures pathways of skilled migration and global talent circulation.

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The share of the South Korean population living alone has substantially increased over the last four decades, sparking public concerns about loneness and its broader effects on individuals and society. In this talk Dr. Hyunjoon Park analyzes trends in living alone in Korea from 1980 to 2020. Analyses show a divergence in solo living between those with more and less education in both younger and older age groups but in oppositive directions. Among young men and women aged 25-34, those with a bachelor’s degree or higher are increasingly more likely to live alone than their peers with a high school education or less. In contrast, among older adults aged 65-74, individuals with the lowest level of education are increasingly more likely to live alone. Dr. Park discusses the implications of solo living trends for family dynamics and inequality in Korea.

Hyunjoon Park is Korea Foundation Professor of Sociology and Director of the James Joo-Jin Kim Center for Korean Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Park is interested in family and social stratification in cross-national comparative perspective, focusing on South Korea and other East Asian societies. He has studied changes in marriage, divorce, and living arrangements as well as consequences of demographic and economic trends for education, well-being, and socioeconomic outcomes of children, adolescents, and young adults in Korea. He was the director of the Korean Millennials Research Lab, a multiyear and multidisciplinary project team tasked with investigating the transition to adulthood among young adults in South Korea and Korean Americans in the US. His publications include the single-authored book Re-Evaluating Education in Japan and Korea: De-mystifying Stereotypes (Routledge, 2013); the coauthored book Diversity and the Transition to Adulthood in America (University of California Press, 2022), and the coedited volume Korean Families Yesterday and Today (University of Michigan Press, 2020). 

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