Recently, three third-year graduate students from SUIBE School of Business attended international academic conferences and, for the first time in the history of the School of Business, gave presentations for their papers. The presence of SUIBE graduate students at international symposiums enriched their academic experience and indicated that their academic potentials were internationally recognized.
On September 13-15, Niu Qingqing, an international trade major, and Li Shilin, an international business major, attended the 20th Annual Conference of the European Trade Study Group (ETSG) hosted by the SGH Warsaw School of Economics in Warsaw, Poland, and presented their papers respectively titled “Import Switching and Comparative Advantage of Firms” and “State Capacity, Governance Network and Institutional Constraints: Micro-evidence from China”. Niu’s paper mainly examined the relationship between the competition of global intermediate product suppliers and import switching as well as the welfare effects on firms arising from import switching. When commenting on the paper, Professor Hylke Vandenbussche pointed out that the contribution of the paper lied in its analysis of the repositioning of immediate products and kindly recommended a paper for reference. Drawing on the model proposed by Acemoglu (2015), Li’s paper argued that inter-regional network games promoted local economic growth, thus exacerbating the gap in economic development between different regions. As found in the paper, institutional constraints such as fiscal decentralization and intergovernmental transfers helped to improve the efficiency of the games between different entities at the county level. The ETSG is a leading-edge forum for academic discussion and research on international trade issues that brings together top researchers from around the world.
Earlier during the summer break, Wu Lanlan, an international trade major, attended the Forum on Finance, Trade and Political Economy jointly sponsored by the Stockholm School of Economics and Peking University, and presented her paper entitled “Financial Shocks and Export: Evidence from the Deregulation of City Commercial Banks in China”, which explored whether, and how, the establishment of city commercial banks in China impacted on export. In his comments on Wu’s paper, Professor Yu Miaojie, from Peking University, remarked that it was of great interest to use city commercial banks as a case study and to analyze the influence of financial factors on the productivity and export of firms in China. At the same time, Professor Yu pointed out that the paper would be more interesting, if it looked at the impact of deregulation of Chinese city commercial banks on domestic sales in addition to export performance.