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| Sung-Ju Wu,Ph.D. student in Economics, 2018 - Present Currently I am conducting a new project with Prof. Hans Hanpu Tung from Department of Political Science, NTU, proposing a game-theoretic model of economic engagement strategies, in which a country deliberately expands the economic cooperation with another country so as to change the latter’s behavior. We modified the clientelism model from Stokes et al. (2013)2 with a single principal-agent setting, where the principal (a foreign country) distributes economic resources through a “political broker” (an ally in the targeted country) in exchange for higher support from the citizens (in the targeted country). This theoretical framework is further adopted to explain Beijing’s economic engagement strategies towards Taiwan and Hong Kong in recent years, and why this strategy seems to have failed. Apart from the theoretical focus, I have incorporated a diverse set of empirical methods from econometrics and statistics in my research projects. Over the past year, I collaborated with Prof. Hans Hanpu Tung on a project analyzing the effect of the Sunflower student movement (which blocked the trade agreement between Taiwan and China in 2014) on Taiwanese support for democracy. Using support vector machine to predict the potential attitudes of survey respondents toward the movement before it actually happened, the paper found that respondents with a potential positive impression of the movement increased their support for democracy, while respondents who potentially disliked the movement became less supportive of democracy. From this experience, I have learned how to empirically estimate the causal effects of social unrest and gained a deeper understanding of how major political events contribute to the development of societies. For future research, I plan to explore topics in development and political economy. For example, an intriguing puzzle worth studying is why nowadays more and more extreme parties and politicians come to power all over the world. Economic issues such as income inequality or free trade could have substantial influences on this phenomenon as well as the overall development of a society. To untangle this puzzle, I aim to undertake deeper training in economic theory and econometrics, and look for research opportunities with scholars in related area. In addition, I would like to study the theories and implications of dynamic games on account of its strong potential to depict the eternally changing nature of political and economic environment with stochastic shocks.
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