Research

 Jheng, Shao-Yu (鄭紹鈺)

I am currently a predoctoral research fellow at Harvard University's Economic Department with Prof. Melissa Dell as well as Harvard IQSS affiliate.  I will be a PhD student in Economics at Harvard University since 2024, Fall. 

At Harvard, I currently work with Melissa Dell, broadly speaking, for two lines of research:  on the one hand, I'm jointly developing new deep learning methods, from multi-modal record linkage to graph neural networks, to unlock the potential of large-scale Japanese historical archival data, which can be used to answer big questions about the East Asian miracle. On the other hand, we are cultivating several novel NLP methods, for example, measuring language change of a large text corpus, like historical American newspapers or scientific journals in the past century, to examine several fundamental issues of political economy: the evolution of political polarization in USA , the spread of ideology, or how paradigms shift within economics and among other scientific fields. 


Fields: Industrial Organization, Development,  Economic History, Political Economy, Deep Learning (Multi-Modal, GNN, NLP).



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

Curriculum Vitae: pdf

Papers


Work in Progress 

-using deep learning pipelines to digitize Japanese firm documents in the 20th century;

-developing multimodal record linkage and visual-based fuzzy matching method to improve accuracy of document matching.

-developing frontier NLP methodology of quantifying langauge change to unlock text data to address  several fundamental political economic issues e.g. polarization, diffusion of ideology, etc;

-developing graph neural network approach and knowledge graph methods that can fit the demand of social sciences;

-exploring how the "embedded nature"--networks of shareholders, supply chains, bank lending, and governmental officials shaped the postwar Japanese miracle. 


2. Divide and Rule: the Persistent Effects of Qing Taiwan’s Aboriginal-Boundary Policy,  with  Koo, Hui-Wen, Ming-Jen Lin, and  Kun-Jung Wu.  

3.Banking and Agricultural Revolution: Evidence from the Commercial Bank Expansion in Early Colonial Taiwan, with Ching-I Huang and Ko-Hua Yap.


Other Writing