Ongoing Research Projects

Grant Period : Aug 2023 to Jul 2028

Faculty : Zeren, LI

Businesspeople and politicians make strategic decisions based on risk assessment. While the existing literature primarily focuses on the economic outcomes of macro-level political risks, my research explores the incentives of politicians and firms to establish different forms of business-government relations under various risk conditions. For this research question, I use China as a case study of a dynamic risk environment, examining the conditions under which the party-state controls, cooperates with, or coerces firms, and the corresponding corporate political strategies. I document business-government relations through a mixed-method approach.

Specifically, I collect granular data on business-government interactions, such as revolving-door employment, official visits, equity structures, and records on procurement, subsidies, and taxation, complementing these with in-depth interviews and survey experiment. Using this abundant data, this research provides a micro-foundational understanding of business-government relations in a context of weak institutionalism.

Grant Period : May 2023 - Apr 2024

Faculty : ZHENG, Huanhuan

Global surges in oil and gas prices provide an opportunity to accelerate clean energy transitions. Substituting traditional fossil fuels with low-carbon clean energy is crucial for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Yet, more technology breakthroughs are needed to produce reliable, affordable and sustainable clean energy on a large scale. This calls for public and private climate actions to advance the clean energy innovation. Innovation is however costly and risky—it requires substantial investments in research and development (R&D) and numerous attempts before generating any returns. Governments kickstart and encourage clean energy innovations through various incentive schemes such as R&D subsidies. With increasingly tightened budget constraints, it is important to direct limited public resources to innovation projects that are most likely to transform the clean energy industry. This proposal seeks to understand what firms could best turn public R&D subsidies into impactful clean energy innovations and the implications for corporate performance and corporate finance.

We collect firm-level data on energy innovations and R&D subsidies to explore the impact of public support on corporate innovations. We classify firms into three categories according to their innovations related to electricity generation technologies, which utilize either clean energy or fossil fuels. Firms concentrating on energy innovations that only use clean energy are labelled as clean firms. Firms specializing on energy innovations that only use fossil fuels are referred as dirty firms. Firms whose energy innovations involve both clean energy and fossil fuels are called mixed firms. We are interested in how these firms with distinct innovation objectives respond to R&D subsidies and the implications for their innovation outputs and impacts. We expect firms consistently pursuing clean energy innovations to benefit more from R&D subsidies for several reasons. First, they have a clear identity that attracts private investments pursuing specific climate goals, which are crucial to sustain the lengthy R&D necessary for technology breakthroughs. Second, with specialized track record, they are more likely to succeed in clean energy innovations, which are highly path-dependent. Third, they enhance corporate reputation in an environment with growing climate activism, which improve corporate valuation and financing that in turn enable more investments in clean energy innovations.

Outputs generated from this research proposal are expected to (i) improve the efficiency of public support in promoting clean energy transitions, (ii) encourage profit-seeking firms to better transform R&D subsidies into clean energy innovations, and (iii) refine policy design to better match public resource with private innovations.

Grant Period : Apr 2023 to Mar 2028

Faculty : Benjamin William CASHORE

There are three themes under the potential deliverables for projects in the funding period of FY23 - FY27.

A: Water Demand Management: 
1. Evaluate how attitudes towards climate change and the environment impact water use behaviour
2. Develop measures to increase awareness of how climate change impacts water sustainability and water use behaviour
3. Evaluate how developments and interventions impact water demand
4. Develop measures to reduce water demand

B: Environmental Sustainability:
1. Benchmark and develop measures to reduce PUB's carbon footprint
2. Evaluate the social and economic impacts of PUB's decarbonisation efforts (e.g. solar photovoltaic panels in reservoirs) and recommend engagement strategies to increase public receptiveness and strengthen engagements and partnerships with stakeholders.
3. Understand the impact of green procurement on the water industry

C: Best Practices in Water Management 
1. Review the relevance of performance indicators used globally in the water sector
2. Explore global trends and innovations in water management

Grant Period : Dec 2022 - Nov 2026

Faculty : LIU Tong

Emerging economies face critical environmental challenges in economic development, but there is a lack of causal evidence on how they affect the economy and how policy instruments can address them effectively. The proposed study will evaluate the social costs of major environmental issues in China and explore policies to tackle these issues in three aspects. First, it will examine the impacts of anthropogenic pollution, climate change, and natural disasters on human capital and economic activities. On top of it, the study will continue to estimate the costs and benefits of environmental policies, including government regulation, incentive-based instruments, and information provision against environmental risks. Lastly, the study will further explore the determinants of environmental policies, including political economy and socioeconomic factors, in central and local governments in China. The research will provide novel and comprehensive evidence on these key questions, make important contributions to understanding the welfare implications of environmental policy and regulation, and offer useful insights into policymaking for sustainable development in China and other regions with similar issues.

Grant Period : Nov 2022 - Oct 2025

Faculty : WU, Alfred Muluan

The proposed project, to the best of our knowledge, is a first attempt to explore the role of intermediate governments in grant transferring process using a detailed analysis of local fiscal data and field interviews. This study will elucidate the debate on fiscal federalism and grant politics in China. 

Previously more academic attention has been paid to the politics of grant making and grant distribution by recipients. Nevertheless, the politics of grant transferring will reflect local political agendas and the relations between different layers of government. Filling in the gap in the literature will substantially enhance the understanding of fiscal federalism and intergovernmental relations in China and beyond, which could have good implications for the real world. 

The project could be scaled up to MOE AcRF Tier 2 after the implementation of the current proposal, given its practical and theoretical implications. We will include Indonesia as a comparative case because China and Indonesia share some similarities and differences in terms of central-local relations. More specifically, both are the most populous countries in the world (Hofman, Zhao & Ishihara, 2007) but adopt a unitary system (Lewis &Smoke, 2017). At the level of decentralization, particularly on the expenditure side, both countries rank very high among all developing countries (Shah, Qibthiyyah, & Dita, 2012; World Bank, 2002). As a centralized system of revenue generation, subnational governments in both China and Indonesia rely heavily on central transfers and subnational governments have been required to implement substantial expenditure programs (Gong & Wu, 2012; Shah, Qibthiyyah, & Dita, 2012). The World Bank has paid a close attention to intergovernmental management in China and Indonesia on the practical level.

As scholars, if we could deepen the nuanced understanding of decentralization and grant politics in two contexts, it would expand the existing literature in the developing context substantially. Students of intergovernmental relations have long been interested in the effectiveness of intergovernmental funds (the amount of transfers was about 5 percent of GDP in industrialized economies, Bahl &Wallace, 2004). Nevertheless, scholars have paid less attention to whether central (or federal) grants will reach the recipients.

There are two lines of argument with regard to the grant-transferring process. Intermediate governments offer a helping hand; therefore they top up central grants to recipient governments using their own resources. Grassroots governments, the main provider of public goods, will have good capacity to provide public services. On the other hand, some argue that intermediate governments have a grabbing hand. Central grants have been retained by intermediate governments while leaving grassroots governments short of fiscal resources and handling increasing public demands. This study attempts to investigate what the role played by provincial governments or prefectural governments in transferring central grants through the administrative hierarchy in China, the largest developing economy in the world.

This study will adopt a qualitative field research method. Two counties in Fujian and Hubei Provinces will be chosen for evaluating the role of intermediate governments. We will adopt a least similar case study method. It means that these two counties in Fujian and Hubei Provinces will receive central transfers, namely the transfer for public sector salary increase and the social security and employment subsidy. However, the targeted counties (one in Fujian and the other in Hubei) will be distinct in economic development (measured by GDP per capita), government revenue per capita, public employment size, and the number of recipients of MLSA. 

The reason for choosing these two field sites is not only due to various amounts of central transfers received by two counties in Fujian and Hubei respectively. Perhaps more importantly, two provinces adopt distinct approaches towards intergovernmental fiscal management within their provinces. Local governments have different fiscal capacities and set different political and policy priorities. Therefore, we can observe the distinct forms of intergovernmental interactions in local China and generate some policy and theoretical implications. The PI has drawn on field research in Fujian and Hubei publishing academic papers (for example, Gong and Wu 2012; Wu 2014). 

Grant Period : Aug 2022 - Jul 2025

Faculty : TAEIHAGH, Araz

The proliferation of AI applications has revolutionised operations while expediting decision-making in many industries. During the pandemic, this was exhibited by using AI to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 (Ting et al., 2020; Khan et al., 2020; Zeng et al., 2020): robots were the key AI applications for telemedicine, diagnosis and forecasting of COVID-19, food and medical supplies delivery, spraying/disinfection and cleaning, and monitoring crowds for social distancing and detecting people with no masks through drones. However, the adoption of AI technologies is not free from risks. The public's perceptions have a major impact on the development, deployment, and regulation of AI applications like robots (Cave et al., 2019). Developing and promoting trustworthy AI has been a key goal of many initiatives (Littman et al., 2021). Governments have also realised the significance of promoting trustworthy AI. The European Commission has laid down harmonised rules for AI intending to promote the adoption of AI and address the associated risks (European Commission, 2021a).    

This project will delve into the various facets of trust in AI to provide nuanced perspectives for policy design. It will analyse the public's views, experts, and policymakers for a holistic perspective on building and improving trust in AI through an interdisciplinary approach. We will conduct multi-city population-level surveys to provide insights on the key factors of trust in AI and gather perspectives from experts to generate valuable lessons for the government on policy design to address risks of AI and build public trust in AI. Understanding public perception is crucial to help policymakers identify the demands of the public or involve the public in decision-making to solve policy problems (Hisschemöller & Midden, 1999). Linking the discourse amongst experts with the findings in the survey will provide a holistic view of factors important for developing and maintaining trust in AI.

Another novel component of this research will be the online survey experiment on a specific segment of AI systems– high-risk AI systems. High-risk AI systems are those applied in critical infrastructures putting the lives of citizens at risk, educational or vocational training, safety components in products such as surgical robots, access to employment such as AI application for sorting CVs, essential private and public services, law enforcement, migration and border control, and administering justice or democratic processes (European commission, 2021b). This study will integrate views from different policy actors and provide recommendations for policy formulation concerning AI technologies. This project will provide a holistic view of the governance of AI, combining primary and secondary data to validate the factors affecting trust in AI and construct policy measures to address risks of AI to enhance trust in the use of AI.  

Grant Period : Feb 2022 - Feb 2026

Faculty : NAIR, Sreeja

Policy experimentation and piloting can play a key role in designing innovative solutions for complex environmental policy challenges of the 21st Century. Climate change, food security and water security are some prime examples of environmental policy problems that are complex i.e., involve multiple actors with multiple ideas and interests, operating across several institutional contexts and there is uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding the policy issue. While the potential of policy experimentation is recognized in theory in allowing for improved policy designs to address such complexity, there are challenges in the policy translation of these experiments in practice. The research under the start-up grant will explore factors and policy processes that influence translation of policy experiments to policy practice.

Policy experiments including pilots have also long been recognized as political, hence making a case for exploring the interplay between technical and political aspects of experimentation. This research can give insights to the question as to why policy experimentation is not seen more commonly, or why are not all policies launched as pilots? The research will draw recommendations for governments on ways to better engage actors and create effective avenues for improved design and deployment of policy experiments as well as effective utilization of their results.

Grant Period : Dec 2021 - Nov 2025

Faculty : BA, Yuhao

The proposed project aims at providing a comprehensive understanding of involvement and leadership of non-state actors in governance systems on a global scale. Such actors typically include businesses, civil society and nonprofits, and local and regional communities. Specifically, three central research questions will be answered: (1) To what extent are non-state actors involved in governance systems? (2) When and how do non-state actors provide governance leadership? (3) Why and how could non-state involvement and leadership affect governance outcomes? (4) How does non-state governance interact with the political and policy processes in varied contexts? Issus areas include climate change, sustainability, and the environment. Data collection will accommodate both developed and developing contexts. 

Upon successfully answering these questions, the proposed project will make three contributions: (1) It will further our understanding of the role and suitability of non-state governance in the aforementioned issue areas. This is particularly important given the increasing challenges facing conventional state- centric arrangements; (2) It will equip scholars and policymakers with new evidence and research agendas in designing, implementing, and evaluating governance solutions. The varied contexts and methods likewise will offer comparative insights; (3) It will add to the school’s thought leadership in environmental and sustainability.

Grant Period : Dec 2021 - Dec 2024

Faculty : Benjamin William CASHORE

The CAPIn GHG project (Instruments for Climate Action Plans Inventories: reducing GHG emissions at the city level) is a 24 months project seeking to examine the selection, uses and effects of GHG inventories in cities in South East Asia and in Europe. Drawing on comparative public policy research, it combines a multilevel analysis of the changes taking place within national case studies and in a context where cities have become significant stakeholders and major drivers for implementing environmental ambitions. Bringing together the knowledge and expertise of LIEPP (Sciences Po & UP) and IESP (LKYSPP, NUS), the CAPIn GHG project sets out to achieve the following objectives : 1) To assess the disconnect between ambitious environmental policy objectives and  the way they are made material through local climate plans and the selection of GHG inventories, 2) To account for the disruptive impact resulting from the setup of new services (e.g., distributed energy), technologies (e.g., H2, electric mobilities) and stakeholders (e.g., global platforms, development entities such as AIIB) and the extent to which GHG inventories account for it; 3) To examine evolving environmental policy capacities (whereas national or local) in relation to setting local climate action plans and select and adjust GHG inventories; 4) To carry out this research in a research framework comparing Asian and European cities, to account for main differences and similarities in local climate action plans and GHG inventories and contribute to current debates about regional policy styles. 

The CAPIn GHG Project will provide an assessment of the design and implementation strategies of policy makers in relation to a complex science-based instrument that has far reaching consequences in terms of accelerating vital city processes such as energy transitions, transport modernization and real-estate development. The variations observed and commonalities found should, in particular, point to the limits of these policy transfers and the embedded nature of these instruments, that while aimed at reducing CO2 levels, may operate along other specific sectoral logics. Second, it will contribute to current academic debates about persisting regional policy styles in mapping GHG emissions and addressing the climate emergency, while at the same time assessing standardizing dynamics resulting from the circulation of policy instruments and solutions through global policy communities and networks.

These findings will lead to a joint publication - edited book in a major university publisher or a special issue - including the contributions generated during the project time span and to a series of in-depth city monographs that will be used for local and international dissemination of the research. The CAPIn GHG project also provides a unique opportunity for joint collaboration between two institutions currently engaged in a major restructuring of their environmental research and teaching activities. 

Grant Period : Mar 2021 - Feb 2025

Faculty : LIU, Yao Adam

This project seeks to exploit the conjoint survey experiment technique to study the following question: Does having political connections help firms obtain bank credit in China, if so, what are the mechanisms? While there exists a large body of literature that studies this question in China and other countries, a fundamental inferential challenge remains, i.e., political connection isn’t randomly assigned. By setting this question up in a conjoint survey experimental with real bank officers in China, this study will be the first to provide micro-level causal evidence for this question. Both personal political connections (e.g., whether the hypothetical firm manager is a member of the local people’s congress) as well as institutional political connections (e.g., whether the firm is owned by varying levels of the state) will be randomized to gauge their influence on bank officer’s credit distribution decision. 

Grant Period : Mar 2021 - May 2024

Faculty : ARARAL, Eduardo

Political trust has been studied as a binary variable (trust or distrust) or using Likert scales in expensive large-N surveys. We propose a more cost-effective set of methodologies – combining 1) the Latent Categories Methodology (LCM); 2) social media analytics (SMA); and 3) computational linguistics (CL).  We call this methodology Big Data and Thick Narratives. Big data refers to SMA and CL. Thick narratives refer to the use LCM to generate heuristics. We elaborate in the next section what these heuristics are and why they are good substitute for or complement to thick narratives. Such an approach has only recently become possible in social sciences, thanks to the recent improvements in computing power, and their use in the analysis of large volumes of information.

We propose to use novel technology to address some of the limitations of conventional methodologies in social science research using an approach we term Big Data and Thick Narratives. Our alternative methodology will triangulate qualitative, quantitative and computational linguistics analyses of historical data. Our aim is to provide pathways for social scientists to investigate important subjects in a cost-effective manner, in the knowledge that better social science provides a foundation for better understanding of societies and better public policies. Notably, the project uses technology (Latent Categories Methodology software) designed and commercialised within the NUS Graduate Innovation Research Programme to demonstrate that - with the assistance of new technologies in big data and AI - open-ended opinion research can be as cost-effective as multiple choice surveys, while providing much greater insight.

Grant Period : Apr 2020 to Mar 2025

Faculty : Benjamin William CASHORE

The purpose of this research project is to integrate, but also expand beyond, contradictory research findings about the negative and positive impacts of economic globalization in shaping country level environmental sustainability policies and management practices. The proposed research will shed light on this confusion in four ways. First, it will apply Cashore and colleague’s “regulatory prescriptiveness” framework (Cashore 1997, Cashore and Auld 2003, McDermott, Cashore, and Kanowski 2010)to code and describe 20 years of environmental policy development within, and across, countries and issue areas.

The substantive focus for this part of the project will target environmental regulations and practices governing forests and land use. This approach is expected to identify much more nuanced and empirically accurate, patterns of both change and stability. Second, and related, the research will apply path dependency analysis to code country level “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) under the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. Third, and related, we will specifically target for in-depth historical and qualitative analysis those subset of cases in which environmental policies were resilient alongside increased economic globalization. This will allow the uncovering of potential micro-level sources of transformative environmental policies (Cashore and Bernstein 2020, Cashore et al. 2019, Levin et al. 2012). Fourth, and as a result, insights will be identified for developing anticipatory policy design processes capable of producing innovative and effective policy mixes (Bernstein et al. 2000). The research will therefore by guided by,and integrate, four themes: identifying anticipatory policy design processes and mixes capable of triggering transformative change (Theme 1); explanations of durable and effective terrestrial conservation and management (Theme 2); evidence of micro-level triggers for low carbon pathways (Theme 3); and drawing on the first three, managing collaborative stakeholder learning processes capable of co-generating knowledge, insights, and implementation strategies (Theme 4).

Grant Period : Feb 2020 to Feb 2025

Faculty : GUPTA, Anubhav

The literature on not-for-profit pension management is nascent compared to the pension literature for for-profit organisations. Several studies have examined not-for-profit pension management strategies in the United States using the Form-5500 datasets published by the U.S. Department of Labor. The existing work in this area suggests that much can be learned about managerial incentives and practices in the not-for-profit sector through examinations of pension management strategies. However, limited data availability hinders more research on this topic.

This research project aims to overcome that barrier by collecting financial information directly from audited financial statements (AFS) of not-for-profit organisations. Audited financial statements offer two significant advantages over the Form-5500. First, several important variables that are missing from the Form 5500 are captured in AFS, such as the expected rate of return on pension assets. Second, AFS data is significantly more reliable than the Form-5500 data because the financial statements are audited and signed by external auditors as required by law. Using AFS data on not-for-profit pensions, this project will examine managerial practices in not-for-profit organisations and compare them with those in for-profit organisations. This will be the first project ever to collect audited data on not-for-profit pensions and thus it has the potential to make significant contributions to research on not-for-profit organisations.

Grant Period : Sep 2019 to Aug 2024

Faculty : LIU, Yao Adam

How has religion affected consequential political and economic outcomes in reform China? This research attempts to fill in this important scholarly gap. The specific outcome variables to be explained with religion range from the development of local coercive institutions to local finance. I focus on coercion and money because these are the primary means with which the CCP sustains power. The method to be employed will be decidedly multi-disciplinary, covering cutting-edge computational social science methods as well as traditional archival work and field research. 

The theoretical significance is several-fold. First, the project contributes to our understanding of the cultural foundations of political and economic (under-)development. Second, it opens up new avenues of research in comparative politics, e.g. how religious institutions affect the spatial organization of coercive institutions. Third, the project presents the first of its kind to study the impact of religious revival in China through rigorous quantitative methods. And finally, this work has a number of theoretically-important yet previously ignored questions such as the conditions under which an authoritarian state would support religious development. [Depending on how the project will unfold, other country cases might be studied too to corroborate potential findings.]