Venue: Room 236, No. 14 Teaching Building, Yuquan CampusSpeaker: Dr. Liangliang (Lilian) Jiang is an Associate Professor at the School of Accounting & Finance, Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). Her research interests include banking and financial institutions, accounting and auditing in corporate governance, economics of regulation and corruption, and environmental economics. Her papers are published or forthcoming in the Review of Financial Studies, Journal of Accounting Research, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Review of Accounting Studies, Journal of Comparative Economics, and others. Her works and views have been presented in major finance conferences such as American Finance Association annual conference (AFA), Western Finance Association annual conference (WFA), European Finance Association annual conference (EFA) and various conferences held by institutions such as Hong Kong Monetary Authority, National Bureau of Economic Research and covered by VoxEU and World Economic Forum, etc.

Venue: Room 118, No. 12 Teaching Building, Yuquan CampusSpeaker: Yonggang Huang, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering (by courtesy) Materials Science and Engineering, Northwestern UniversityAbstract:Continuous monitoring of blood pressure, an essential measure of health status, typically requires complex, costly, and invasive techniques that can expose patients to risks of complications. Continuous, cuffless, and noninvasive blood pressure monitoring methods that correlate measured pulse wave velocity (PWV) to the blood pressure via the Moens−Korteweg (MK) and Hughes Equations, offer promising alternatives. The MK Equation, however, involves two assumptions that do not hold for human arteries, and the Hughes Equation is empirical, without any theoretical basis. The results presented here establish a relation between the blood pressure P and PWV that does not rely on the Hughes Equation nor on the assumptions used in the MK Equation. This relation degenerates to the MK Equation under extremely low blood pressures, and it accurately captures the results of in vitro experiments using artificial blood vessels at comparatively high pressures. For human arteries, which are well characterized by the Fung hyperelastic model, a simple formula between P and PWV is established within the range of human blood pressures. This formula is validated by literature data as well as by experiments on human subjects, with applicability in the determination of blood pressure from PWV in continuous, cuffless, and noninvasive blood pressure monitoring systems. 

Venue: Room 250, Mon Mai Wai Building, Zijingang CampusSpeaker: Professor Bill DurodieProfessor Durodie is chair of Risk and Security in International Relations, as well as a former head of the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies, at the University of Bath in the UK. He was educated at Imperial College London, the London School of Economics and New College Oxford. He obtained his PhD through the Centre for Decision Analysis and Risk Management of Middlesex University.His main research interest is to examine the causes and consequences of contemporary perceptions of risk, as well as how these are framed and communicated across a range of issues relating to security, science and society.Abstract:Brexit appears to confuse, divide and anger people alike. But is it the cause of this, or the consequence of other processes?Certainly, many associates it with the advent of Trump and the rise of so-called populist parties across Europe and beyond.What does this all mean for a China that is growing and looking for predictability in the world order?Britain is not some third-rate power but remains one of the world's largest economies. Now the EU Council have agreed to allow yet another extension to this exhausting and inflammatory process - to 31 October. But it need not end there. Meanwhile many enterprises complain about being in limbo. And next month, the people of Europe, including the UK now, will get a chance to get their voices heard in European Parliament elections. Already Marinne Le Pen in France, the leader of the nationalist Front Nationale, is campaigning on the basis of the EU not allowing the UK to leave. Of course, all of this had been made worse by a fundamental divide between the people, who voted to leave, and their leaders who do not want to. So what, if anything, ought China to know or learn from all this? Are their important lessons in maintaining popular support that even non-democratic countries ought to head?

Venue: Xixi Hall, 1st floor, Alumni Center, Zijingang CampusSpeaker: Yuxin Chen is the Dean of Business and the Distinguished Global Professor of Business at NYU Shanghai, with an affiliation with Stern School of Business, New York University. Prior to NYU Shanghai, Dr. Chen was the Polk Brothers Professor of Retailing and Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and was a tenure professor at NYU Stern. The primary research interests of Dr. Chen include data-driven marketing, Internet marketing, pricing, retailing, competitive strategies, structural empirical models, Bayesian econometric methods, behavioral economics, and marketing in emerging markets.   Dr. Chen received his B.S. in Physics from Fudan University, a MSBA and a Ph.D. in Marketing from Washington University in St. Louis. He also studied in Computer Science department in the Graduate School of Zhejiang University.  Abstract:This research develops a new approach for in-consumption social listening and demonstrates its value in the context of online movie watching wherein viewers can react to movie content with live comments. Specifically, we propose a novel measure, moment-to-moment synchronicity (MTMS), to capture consumers’ in-consumption engagement. MTMS refers to the synchronicity between temporal variations in the volume of live comments and those in movie content mined from unstructured video, audio, and text data from movies. We demonstrate that MTMS has a significant impact on viewers’ post-consumption appreciation of movies, and it can be evaluated at finer level to identify engaging content. Finally, we discuss the relation between MTMS and existing in-consumption measures and the value of integrating supply-side content information into in-consumption analysis.

Venue: Room 225, College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Zijingang CampusSpeaker: Tony D James

Venue: Room 457, Nano Building, Zijingang CampusSpeaker: Dr. Cunqi Ye, Assistant Instructor in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. 

Venue: Room 418, School of Economics, Yuquan CampusSpeaker: Christina Li works as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge since 2017. She obtained her PhD degree in real estate finance and economics from the University of Hong Kong in 2017. Christina’s research areas include behavioural economics, household finance, real estate and urban economics, and public policies. She has published in the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. She is currently working on a collaborative project between the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) on behavioral sciences and rural finance in China. With the cooperation of local banks, she has been conducting field experiments to help consumers develop good financial habits in rural China.Abstract:As an important part of the development of financial inclusion, mobile banking offers an alternative interface for engaging with bank accounts, which allows customers to access various payment services, such as account bank enquiry, remittance, bill payment and financial management. This functionality provides bank account users in less developed areas great convenience by freeing them from temporal and spatial constraints and enabling them to use bank services at anytime from anywhere. Given these substantial benefits, this paper analyses a randomized field experiment to shed light on the role of information in customers’ decisions to adopt mobile banking via smart phones. By cooperating with a Rural Commercial Bank in China, we randomly introduced specific information regarding mobile bank to customers and examined whether it is possible to affect their behaviours using such a relatively inexpensive informational intervention. We find substantial effects of our relatively mild intervention: the participants that received specific information about mobile bank are more likely to actively use mobile bank to manage their financial services than the participants who received none. We also find that, in comparison to non-users or inactive users, active mobile bank users consume less, which requires fewer remittances and deposits to make ends meet.

Venue: Room 1102, Information and Library Center Building C, Zijingang CampusSpeaker: Dr. Xiaohui Zhang, Senior Lecturer, University of ExeterXiaohui Zhang is now the Senior lecturer in the Business School, University of Exeter, UK. She received his PhD in Econometrics and Health Economics from Monash University, Australia in 2009. Before joining the University of Exeter, she had been working at Monash University and Murdoch University, Australia. His primary research interestsin applied micro-econometrics, including cross-sectional and panel data modelling, applied Bayesian econometrics, semi-parametric and non-parametric modelling and productivity and efficiency analysis. My research topics are across individual health status, health services utilization, private health insurance purchasing decision, chronic diseases, rare diseases, children obesity, hospital performance, health care expenditure, etc. He has published in leading academic journals including Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Annals of Applied Statistics, Journal of Econometrics, Health Economics, Review of International Economics, Journal of Productivity Analysis, Journal of Banking & Finance, and so on.Abstract:This paper studies the role of reputation effects in individual hospital choices. Our analysis focuses on birth episodes in the Melbourne metropolitan area from 2011/12. We examine the decision behaviour of women with private health insurance in selecting one of 18 local hospitals. First of all, we examine how observed hospital performance and unobserved hospital reputation influence a patient’s willingness to travel between her residential location and the chosen hospital. In addition, to investigate the probability of an individual hospital being selected from all given hospitals by a patient, we adopt a multinomial probit (MNP) model estimated by a Bayesian method. In this study, we allow for correlations across hospitals, due to the similarities across hospitals attributable to geographic locations and other hospital characteristics such as the hospital ownership. We find that there are significant hospital specific differences in the willingness to travel, which suggests that people travel further to visit more reputable institutions. This result is complemented by substantial differences in the probabilities of specific hospitals being chosen. A comprehensive simulation study is conducted by using the estimated results from the MNP model to examine how hospitals’ performance and locations impact the population’s hospital selection decision. By varying the geographic locations, the performance of the hospitals and other hospital characteristics, we examine the differences in its overall impacts on the population’s hospital selection decision. This exercise provides valuable evidence and guidance to policy and government decision makers.

Venue: Room 245, College of Life Science, Zijingang CampusSpeaker: Michael Broberg Palmgren, Professor in Plant Physiology at the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of Copenhagen