Research

Jheng, Shao-Yu (鄭紹鈺)

I am a PhD student in Economics at Harvard University, as well as Harvard IQSS affiliate and Harvard CID affiliate. I am also co-chair of a seminar series at the Center for European Studies titled “European Development in a Historical Perspective”.

My research topics include (i) (rapid) industrialization and premature deindustrialization; (ii) state capacity and industrial policy; (iii) institutions; and (iv) international aid policy, covering the fields across political economy, economic history, development economics, and industrial organization. He is currently conducting several projects on comparing East Asia, Europe, and Africa's divergent development paths using both historical and experimental data.

Fields: Industrial Organization, Development, Economic History, Political Economy, Deep Learning

Email:
shaoyujheng@fas.harvard.edu
or
r06323010@ntu.edu.tw

Curriculum Vitae: pdf

WoRking Papers

"Moore’s Law in the Cost Data: Vintages, Learning, and Scale in Semiconductor Manufacturing," with Ming-yen Ho and Mitsuru Igami. Draft Preparation.
"Jungle Fever: Commodity Boom, Firm Dynamics, and Japan's War against Taiwan's Highlanders", with Yi-Fan Chen. Draft Preparation.
"Social Network and Industrial Policy: Japan’s Discretionary Procurement in Colonial Taiwan’s Camphor Industry, with Yi-fan Chen, working paper. Got rejected and majorly revised.
"Linking Representations with Multimodal Contrastive Learning," with Abhishek Arora, Xinmei Yang, and Melissa Dell, working paper. (arxiv link)
"Inclusive Origins of Rapid Industrialization: the Persistent Effects of the Colonial Bank Networks on Taiwan’s Economic Miracle" with Ching-I Huang (2021), working paper (SSRN link). Under major revision.

Publications

“Property Rights in a Weak State: Evidence from Land Pawning in Qing Taiwan (1683-1895)," with Hui-wen Koo, and Kun-jung Wu. Asia-Pacific Economic History Review, forthcoming.
"Quantifying Character Similarity with Vision Transformers," with Xinmei Yang, Abhishek Arora , and Melissa Dell, 2023, accepted by Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).
"The Conflict between Two Sides of the Himalayan Hump: Competition of USA Lend-Lease Resources between Battlefields in Burma and Mainland China (1942-1945)", (in Chinese, with the title "駝峰兩面之爭議 :美國對華租借物資在緬甸戰場與中國戰場的競爭 (1942-1945)"), forthcoming in 《中國遠征軍系列叢書:戰爭宣傳與外交角力》
[working paper version( in Chinese)]

Summary: Why did the USA extend the Lend-Lease program to China during the Second World War? What are the relationships between the competition of aid resources and the intensified U.S.-China political conflict during the WWII? I use novel historical sources including the USA's Reports to Congress on Lend-Lease Operation, Stilwell's Diary, and more importantly, Chiang Kai-Shek' s Chronological Event Transcripts as well as Chiang Kai-Shek' s Diaries to examine the causes and consequences of the wartime aid policy of the USA in China.

Work in Progress

Applying deep learning methodology to unleash historical data, with Melissa Dell and her lab members.

2.The Technological Origins of Objective Journalism, with Quan Le. Data Prepared. In the Anaysis Stage...

3. Family as Firm Bottleneck and Separation Faliure. Data Preparation.

4. Leapfrogging like Korea (with Jaedo Choi, Wenyuan Lu, and Sangyoon Park). Data preparation.

5. Chiefs and Technolgy Adoption in South Africa (with Yating Chuang and Syden Mishi) Preparing Pre-anaylsis plan for field experiments.

6. The Nature of Inventions in Chinese History–A Quantitative Approach, with Yiyang Chen and Yasheng Huang.

7. Marketing Boards and Agricultural Distortions in Developing Countries, with Seng Yee Sin. Data Preparation.

8. Testing Microfoundations: Hand-to-Mouth in a High Saving Economy, with Ming-jen Lin, Hui-Ci Nian, and Cashua Wang. Accessing Data.

9. The Mongol Shock and the Silk Road, with Rafael Torres Gaviria. Data Preparation.

10. Vietnam War, Rubber, and Land Reform, with Santiago Paz Ramos. Data Prepartion.

**The Basic Facts of Rapid Growing Economies:

"We all agree that the basic requirement of any model is that it should be capable of explaining the characteristic features of the economic process as we find them in reality" (Kaldor 1961)...

It's surprising that we are not knowing how rapid growing economies' facts generally look like. Did Taiwan grow like South Korea? Is Viethnam growing like China? I don't think so. If they share something in common, what are these key factors? If they differ, why?

Other Writing

"Why Was There No Capitalism in China? Reflections on the Great Divergence", (in Chinese, with the title: "為什麼中國沒有資本主義?《大分流》之後的反思"), with Lin, Ming-Jen.
This is an invited essay (written in Chinese) collected in the newest Chinese edition of Pomeranz's book, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. We review the receptions of this book among historians and social scientists, and provide our own comments.
Book Review (in Chinese): This Is What Inequality Looks Like by Youyenn Teo. (Review Link)
Book Review (in Chinese): Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation by Dana E. Powell. (Review Link)

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