Venue Changed to the Philippines Conference Room

In 1992, Cambodia became a United Nations (UN) protectorate—the first and only time the UN tried something so ambitious. What did the new, democratically-elected government do with this unprecedented gift? Cambodians today live in the grip of a venal government that refuses to provide even the most basic services without a bribe. Nearly half of the Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge era suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. A malnourished populace still lives as Cambodians did 1,000 years ago, while government officials are the only overweight people in a nation where the hungry waste away. These conditions have not, however, dissuaded the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) from acceding the Cambodian regime's desire to chair ASEAN in 2012. Prof. Joel Brinkley will turn an unsparing analytical eye on these and related aspects of Cambodian history, political economy, and foreign policy.

Joel Brinkley joined Stanford in the fall of 2006 after a 23-year career with The New York Times. At the Times he served as a reporter, editor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent. At Stanford, he writes a weekly column on foreign affairs that appears in some 50 newspapers and web sites in the United States and around the world. He also writes on foreign affairs for Politico, and maintains an active public-speaking career. His research interests include American foreign policy and foreign affairs in general. Over the last 30 years, he has reported from 46 American states and more than 50 foreign countries. The latest of his five books is Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land (2011), already lauded by a reviewer in The American Interest as a "compelling" and "revealing tale of delusion and corruption" told with "panache."  Copies of the book will be available for sale at the talk.

Venue Changed to the Philippines Conference Room

China has recently reformed its health care system with the intent of providing universal coverage for basic health care to every Chinese citizen. Three separate health insurance plans have recently been launched to achieve this objective: the rural newly cooperative medical scheme, urban resident health insurance, and urban employee-based health insurance. Each plan differs substantially in terms of insurers, insured population, premiums, and benefits packages. Using data from the 2009 China Health and Nutrition Survey, Hai Fang will discuss a study that investigates whether and to what extend different health insurance plans have created disparities in health care utilization and expenditure.

Hai Fang is an assistant professor in the Department of Health Systems, Management, and Policy at the University of Colorado Denver, and a research associate in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He earned his doctorate in economics and master of public health from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2006. Before joining the University of Colorado Denver, he taught at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Miami. His research interests include health economics, labor economics, and public health.

This seminar explores whether and to what extent the relative circumstances of men and women following marital dissolution affect sex selection behavior within marriages. China's new divorce law, which was enacted in 2001, reduced divorce costs, especially for women, by granting the right to divorce and claim damages in the case of domestic violence and extra-marital relationships and by securing women's property rights upon divorce. Ang Sun has modeled the legal change as a decrease in women's divorce costs in a household in which all the marital surplus accrues to the husband. Sun shows: (1) that the new divorce law predicts an increase in divorce rates after the birth of a daughter; (2) that the new law results in fewer sex-selective abortions for the second birth if the first birth produced a daughter; and (3) that the effect of the new law on the sex ratio should have diminishing returns to divorce cost reduction for women. All the predictions are supported by the empirical evidence. Most importantly, she finds that most of the decline occurred in historically high divorce-cost regions, which is consistent with the predictions of the model and helps rule out concomitant changes in household income and relative returns to male and female children.

Ang Sun received her PhD from Brown University’s Department of Economics. Sun’s research interests encompass development economics, labor and demographic economics, and health economics. She focuses on intra-household allocations, gender differences, and household formation. In particular, she studies how a combination of different forces in China—including traditional values, rapid growth, and the population structure—is affecting Chinese families.

KSP visiting scholar Hyun Jeoung Lee, a South Korean attorney and former public prosecutor, will analyze the problem of rebates by pharmaceutical companies. She will provide background on the Korean pharmaceutical industry and review the Korean government's efforts to combat the problem, including the latest legislation, regulation, and prosecution.

Hyun Jeoung Lee is an attorney at the leading Korean law firm of Kim & Chang, in the White Collar Criminal Defense Practice Group. Before joining the firm in 2007, she served as a public prosecutor for 10 years, developing expertise in a wide range of criminal law matters and was awarded honors by the Korean government, including the titles of Public Prosecutor General (2003) and Cabinet Minister of the Ministry of Justice (2006).

Lee completed her master's work in competition and antitrust laws at the Graduate School of Legal Studies at Korea University in 2006. She has extensive experience in white collar criminal defense, primarily in the areas of securities fraud, insider trading, and other corporate crimes, including fair trade regulation.