Speaker: Buhui Qiu Venue: Room 530, No. 7 Chengjun Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: We examine whether specialized investment social media shapes firm boundaries by promoting the formation of strategic alliances. Using Seeking Alpha coverage initiation as a shock to a firm’s information environment, we find that social media coverage significantly accelerates corporate cooperative activities: alliance intensity increases by 35% and the annual probability of forming any alliance rises by 4.1 percentage points. This real-economy effect is concentrated in information opaque firms under severe financial constraints and larger industry shocks. Covered firms subsequently raise more debt capital and attract more sophisticated investors and monitors. Alliances formed post-initiation exhibit superior long-run operating and stock performance. Taken together, our results suggest that non-traditional information intermediaries influence the real allocation of resources by simultaneously improving capital market access and closing the visibility gap.

Speaker: Li MingVenue: Room 718 School of Economics, Zijingang CampusAbstract: We decode China’s industrial policies from 2000 to 2022 by employing large language models (LLMs) to extract and analyze rich information from a comprehensive dataset of 3.3 million documents issued by central, provincial, and city-level governments. Through careful prompt engineering, multistage extraction and refinement, and rigorous verification, we use LLMs to classify the industrial policy documents and extract structured information on targeted industries, policy tones (supportive or regulatory/suppressive), implementation tools, etc. Combining these newly constructed industrial policy data with micro-level firm data, we explore the political economy of industrial policy, focusing on the economic and political foundations of sector choice and its evolution over time. We find 2013 as a turning point for policy recentralization, both in the central policies' coverage and strength and in the local governments' compliance. We document spatial inefficiencies and industry-wide overcapacity as potential downsides of industrial policies.

Speaker: Xinyu CaoVenue: Room 718 School of Economics, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Many online shopping platforms allow buyers to upload photos with their product reviews, giving prospective consumers access to visual information beyond seller-provided product images. Yet it remains unclear whether such buyer-generated images help or hurt subsequent sales. We examine the demand consequences of buyer review photos and how their effects depend on the visual information they provide relative to seller images. Using item-day data from apparel products on a large e-commerce platform, we exploit the arrival of the first buyer review containing photos and implement a matched event-study design. We find that the arrival of buyer review photos leads to an average 2.8% decline in subsequent sales. Importantly, this negative effect is larger when there is a larger visual gap between buyer- and seller-provided images. We further examine specific visual characteristics underlying this discrepancy. Differences in visual appeal account for part of the negative effect associated with the seller-buyer model-image gap, whereas differences in technical image quality and scene complexity play comparatively limited roles. Together, our findings show that buyer-generated product photos do not necessarily facilitate sales. Instead, their demand consequences depend critically on whether the visual information they reveal confirms or conflicts with the product presentation created by sellers.

Date & Time: October 8, 2026, 10:00–11:30 (Beijing Time)Speaker: Prof. Jing (Jill) LeiVenue: Room A523, School of Management, Zijingang Campus, Zhejiang UniversityHost: YANG ZheshuaiAbstract: For health conditions ranging from the common cold to cancer, patients often face a decision between conservative and aggressive options. For example, a person diagnosed with thyroid nodules might weigh watchful waiting against a minimally invasive thyroidectomy. In today’s patient-centred healthcare, patients play a growing role in treatment decision-making (Elwyn 2021; Epstein 2000). A key patient-related factor, socio-economic status (SES), is consistently linked to health outcomes (Adler et al. 1994), yet the behavioral mechanisms driving these outcomes are less understood. Our research explores how SES influences patient preference for aggressive vs. conservative treatments.About the speaker: Jing (Jill) Lei is a Professor of Marketing and former Head of the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Melbourne with over 100 full-time academic members. Her current research focuses on consumers’ judgment and decision-making in the context of public health and well-being. Her ongoing projects include studying consumers’ judgments and decisions related to medications, treatment options, and participation in preventive actions. She served as AE for the Journal of Consumer Psychology and is a member of the Health Analytics, Leadership, and Economics Hub and the Melbourne Health and Business Research Hub at the University of Melbourne. She has published in marketing journals (e.g., Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, among others), as well as in interdisciplinary journals (e.g., Appetite, Public Health Nutrition, Obesity Reviews).

Speaker: Laurent COGNETVenue: Room 215, No. 8 Hainayuan Building, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Single-molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) has set a new paradigm in optical imaging, providing access to structural and dynamic processes at the nanoscale, well beyond the diffraction limit. Yet, extending SMLM from isolated cells to complex, intact biological tissues remains challenging, notably because of the limited brightness of fluorescent emitters and poor light penetration at visible wavelengths.To circumvent these limitations, we developed a framework combining SMLM with single-wall carbon nanotubes luminescing in the short-wave infrared (SWIR). Tracking individual nanotubes enables the extracellular space (ECS) of intact live brain tissues to be mapped and explored at the nanoscale, including in the context of neurodegenerative diseases. Building on this strategy, I will present how a toolbox of SWIR nanoprobes, advanced optical modalities, and analytical methods can reveal the complexity of diffusion processes in the brain ECS. Our recent measurements preformed in 3D uncover the scale-dependent emergence of hindered diffusion, providing new insights into the physical organization and transport properties of this complex medium. Finally, single-particle orientation tracking of ultrashort nanotubes allows local viscosity and spatial tortuosity to be disentangled, revealing rheological features inaccessible through translational diffusion analysis alone.

Speaker: Yongzhong SunVenue: Room 101, Haina Building 2, Zijingang CampusAbstract: This lecture explores the stability of viscous incompressible fluids driven by buoyancy, using the Boussinesq equations as a mathematical model. The speaker will introduce a class of stationary fluid states with a strictly increasing background temperature and investigate how the fluid behaves under small perturbations of these states. The main results establish global existence and decay of such perturbations, showing that the corresponding stationary solutions are asymptotically stable under suitable conditions. The talk will also discuss extensions to the inhomogeneous incompressible Navier–Stokes equations and several open problems. Throughout the lecture, particular attention will be given to how Fourier analysis and energy methods can be combined to study the stability of nonlinear fluid systems. This is joint work with the speaker’s former Ph.D. students Lihua Dong and Jianguo Li.

Speaker: Hari ShroffVenue: Lecture Room, Floor 1,Chow Yei Ching Building, Yuquan CampusAbstract: I will discuss our efforts to chart embryo development in the roundworm C. elegans. In addition to describing the integration of scRNAseq data with light-sheet microscopy tracking data, I will describe our current challenges with imaging and new and unpublished methods that have the potential to dramatically improve the spatiotemporal resolution of optical microscopy.

Speaker: Paul JacksonVenue: Room 426, School of Economics, Zijingang CampusAbstract: This paper studies the role of uncertainty regarding one's best career fit in shaping the college wage premium. We document stark differences in the first half of workers careers by educational attainment. College workers switch occupations and separate into unemployment at a low rate, all while experiencing rapid wage growth. Non-college workers change occupations frequently, exhibit a high separation rate, and exhibit sluggish wage growth. To account for these facts, we build a life cycle search model with learning about career fit and endogenous human capital accumulation on the job. Workers who are more certain that they are in a good match with their career invest more in human capital accumulation and experience higher wage growth. Our quantitative analysis affirms large disparities in career uncertainty by educational attainment, and these differences account for a considerable share of the overall skill premium.

Speaker: Robert WestVenue: Lecture Room, Floor 1, School of Medicine, Zijingang CampusAbstract: Professor Robert West is Emeritus Professor of Health Psychology at University College London (UCL), founder of PRIME Theory of Motivation, and one of the key co-creators of the COM-B model and the Behaviour Change Wheel. His research has long focused on motivation, addictive behaviours, health behaviour change, and the theoretical development of behaviour interventions, and has had broad international influence in the fields of health psychology and behavioural science. In particular, he has made important contributions in the fields of smoking cessation and tobacco control.Professor West has long been committed to elucidating nicotine addiction, smoking cessation motivation, the maintenance of smoking cessation behaviour, and relapse mechanisms. He has led and participated in policy-influential continuous monitoring studies such as the UK “Smoking Toolkit Study,” providing important evidence-based support for UK tobacco control policy, the optimisation of smoking cessation services, and the assessment and forecasting of population smoking cessation trends. He formerly served as Director of Tobacco Studies at the Cancer Research UK Health Behaviour Research Centre, and has long served as a consultant to UK institutions related to smoking cessation training and tobacco control.