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
“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.
"Social Network and Industrial Policy: Japan’s Camphor Monopoly in Colonial Taiwan, with Yi-fan Chen, working paper. (SSRN link)
"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).
"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.
(previous title: Inclusive Institutions, Capital Formation, and Origins of Rapid Industrialization : Evidence from the Colonial Commercial Bank Networks in Taiwan,")"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.
It includes, but is not limited to:
-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
"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)