In addition to the most pressing issues of the day, scholars at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies focus their research on many regions of the world, from Beijing to Brazil.
Research Spotlight
The Ripple Effects of China’s College Expansion on American Universities
Researchers at SCCEI trace how China’s unprecedented expansion of higher education has impacted U.S. graduate education and local economies surrounding college towns.
While Nayib Bukele's style of authoritarianism may have some successes on paper, Beatriz Magaloni and Alberto Diaz-Cayeros argue that the regime is headed for a reckoning.
Time for Iran to Make a No-enrichment Nuclear Deal
The time has come for Iran’s leaders to reconsider their past intransigent, deceptive posture and instead pursue a nuclear power program that will benefit the Iranian people, write Abbas Milani and Siegfried Hecker.
A growing body of research on large language models (LLMs) has identified various biases, primarily in contexts where biases reflect societal patterns. This article focuses on a different source of bias in LLMs—government censorship. By comparing foundation models developed in China and those from outside China, we find substantially higher rates of refusal to respond, shorter responses, and inaccurate responses to a battery of 145 political questions in China-originating models. These disparities diminish for less-sensitive prompts, showing that technological and market differences cannot fully explain this divergence. While all models exhibit higher refusal to respond rates with Chinese-language prompts than English ones, language differences are less pronounced than disparities between China-originating and non-China-originating models. We caution that our study is observational and cross-sectional and does not establish a causal linkage between regulatory pressures and censorship behaviors of China-originating LLMs, but these results suggest that censorship through government regulation requiring companies to restrict political content may be an important factor contributing to political bias in LLMs.
Children deprived of their liberty in the US juvenile justice, criminal justice, and immigration detention systems face profound and evolving health risks that demand a creative, sustained, and urgent pediatric response. These risks unfold within distinct but overlapping systems that share structural gaps in oversight, inconsistent standards of care, and a legacy of harm to children’s health and development. A promising opportunity lies in linking expertise across these systems to strengthen care, safeguard rights, and address the vulnerabilities of this often-overlooked population, which is disproportionately composed of racially and ethnically minoritized children.
The Review of Economics and Statistics,
January 8, 2026
This paper exploits the universe of credit- and debit-card transactions in China during 2013–2015 and provides the first nationwide analysis of the health care cost of PM2.5 for a developing country. We leverage spatial spillovers of PM2.5 from long-range transport to generate exogenous variation in local pollution, and we employ a flexible distributed lag model to capture semiparametrically the dynamic response of pollution exposure. We find significant impacts of PM2.5 on health care spending in both the short and medium terms. A 10 g/m decrease in PM2.5 would reduce annual health care spending by over $9.2 billion, about 1.5% of China’s annual health care expenditure.
Why do authoritarian regimes charge political opponents with nonpolitical crimes when they can levy charges directly related to opponents’ political activism? We argue that doing so disguises political repression and undermines the moral authority of opponents, minimizing backlash and mobilization. To test this argument, we conduct a survey experiment, which shows that disguised repression decreases perceptions of dissidents’ morality, decreases people’s willingness to engage in dissent on behalf of the dissident, and increases support for repression of the dissident. We then assess the external validity of the argument by analyzing millions of Chinese social media posts made before and after a large crackdown of vocal government critics in China in 2013. We find that individuals with larger online followings are more likely to be charged with nonpolitical crimes, and those charged with nonpolitical crimes are less likely to receive public sympathy and support.
China Agricultural Economic Review,
December 24, 2025
Purpose: Previous research has found an association between with early childhood development (ECD) and paternal beliefs and evidence suggests that paternal beliefs about their own role in child rearing might affect parental involvement. However, there has been no such empirical study in rural China. This study examines the interrelationships among paternal beliefs, parental involvement and ECD among rural Chinese children.
Design/methodology/approach: Data used for this study were collected from 6-to-42-month-old children and their primary caregivers in southwestern China in 2020. ECD was assessed by the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development-III. Paternal beliefs were assessed with the Role of the Father Questionnaire. The non-parametric regression methods were used to construct the factor scores of ECD. The ordinary least squares models, the mediation models and the bootstrapping approach were employed to investigate the interrelationships of paternal beliefs, parental involvement and ECD.
Findings: A large share of the sample children displayed delays in cognitive, language and social-emotional development. Paternal involvement significantly mediated the link between paternal beliefs and child cognitive and social-emotional development, while maternal involvement mediated the associations between paternal beliefs and child language and social-emotional development.
Originality/value: This study provides a unique contribution by utilizing unique data fathers' beliefs and their involvement in parenting to investigate the underlying mechanisms of how the role of fathers in parenting can lead to the improvement of early child developmental outcomes. This study also provides the first empirical evidence on the role of paternal beliefs in fostering human capital formation during the early stages of life in rural China. This study suggests that shifting paternal beliefs and improving parental involvement are effective pathways to benefit rural children in their early development.
SHP's Maya Rossin-Slater, PhD, an assistant professor of health policy, writes in this Boston Globe editorial that the Brown University mass shooting renewed headlines about the debate over gun laws and blame. But after the headlines fade, the students who lived through it will be left to cope with the aftermath.
