Each year, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies invites faculty members at Harvard University who work on China to join our more than 50 faculty members who advise and support the Center’s research and strategic planning. We are fortunate to welcome two new faculty members this year to the Fairbank Center.
Jie Bai is an Associate Professor in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from MIT in June 2016, and spent one year at Microsoft Research New England prior to joining HKS in 2017. Her research focuses on firms and markets in developing countries and emerging economies, addressing two broad questions: First, what are the key barriers and constraints that hinder firm growth and upgrading in developing countries? Second, understanding these, how can we then structure effective policies to alleviate firm-level constraints and market frictions to facilitate private sector development? Methodologically, Professor Bai combines large-scale randomized control trials, quasi-experimental applied micro techniques, and structural modeling tools from industrial organization and international trade. Her research sheds light on how firms make decisions, and how markets are organized to generate incentives and allocate resources. For the past ten years, she’s conducted research in China, East Africa, and Southeast Asia, and collaborated with governments and non-government organizations to design, implement and evaluate industrial, trade, and development policies.
Moira Weigel is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Harvard University Department of Comparative Literature and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University and a Sociotechnical Security Fellow at the Data and Society Research Institute. She received her Ph.D. from the joint program in Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. She writes and teaches about the history, theory, and social life of media and communication technologies, from the early 19th century to the present. Her recent research focuses on transnational online marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay and China’s “four little dragons” (四小龙): Alibaba, Shein, Temu, and TikTok. She notes that despite tech competition, cross-border e-commerce (跨境电商) has made ordinary people in China and the U. S. ever more closely entangled. She is the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2016, Macmillan) and the co-editor (with Ben Tarnoff) of Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (2020, FSG Originals).