Based on her recent, front-line role managing one of the world’s most consequential bilateral relationships, Sarah Beran offers an insider’s perspective on the evolution of U.S. China-related policies from the Biden administration into a second Trump term. Shaped by her tenure at the National Security Council and in Beijing during a period of heightened tensions, Beran will explain U.S. efforts to align allies, de-risk supply chains, and counter coercive behavior. As a recent leader of the U.S. diplomatic mission in China, Beran will detail the operational realities of U.S. diplomacy with China.  Please join us for a candid assessment of whether a stable equilibrium between competition and coexistence is achievable in today’s evolving strategic environment.

Speaker: Sarah Beran joined Macro Advisory Partners following a distinguished 23-year career in the US Foreign Service, most recently serving as Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Beijing and as Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs at the White House National Security Council. As the principal advisor to the President and National Security Advisor on China and Taiwan (2022-2024), her portfolio encompassed technology export controls, investment screening, trade policy, counternarcotics, Russia sanctions and Taiwan contingency planning. She led strategic preparations for multiple heads-of-state summits, negotiated the reopening of senior diplomatic channels with Beijing, and helped forge the first US-China understanding on AI safety in the context of nuclear command and control. At the National Security Council, Sarah also led interagency policy coordination on the expansion of technology export controls, investment screening, trade policy, counternarcotics, Russia sanctions and Taiwan contingency planning. Sarah also served as former US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s Deputy Executive Secretary for the Indo-Pacific, led the office responsible for US engagement in APEC and served as former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s Director of the Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs. She was posted overseas in Beijing, Islamabad, Jerusalem and Quito, and she speaks Mandarin and Spanish. Sarah is a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations and the Asia Society’s Task Force on US-China Policy.

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Drawing on nearly three decades of diplomatic experience and her current work at Yale, Susan Thornton will assess the current trajectory of U.S.–China relations at a moment of renewed geopolitical tension. Based on long-standing official leadership and unofficial engagement via “Track II” dialogues, Thornton will outline prospects for limited cooperation on global challenges – from combatting pandemics to nuclear security – and describe strategic choices the two powers face in light of competition and continued interdependence.  Thornton will also explore how Asian partners interpret recent U.S. policy shifts, at times balancing security concerns with economic ties abroad.  This talk will invite the audience to consider whether a pragmatic, interest-based framework for engagement remains possible—and necessary—in the current era.

Speaker: Susan A. Thornton is a retired senior U.S. diplomat with almost three decades of experience with the U.S. State Department in Eurasia and East Asia. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Law and Senior Fellow at the Yale Law School Paul Tsai China Center. She is also the director of the Forum on Asia-Pacific Security at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Until July 2018, Thornton was Acting Assistant Secretary for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the Department of State and led East Asia policymaking amid crises with North Korea, escalating trade tensions with China, and a fast-changing international environment. In previous State Department roles, she worked on U.S. policy toward China, Korea and the former Soviet Union and served in leadership positions at U.S. embassies in Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasus and China. Thornton received her M.A. in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and her B.A. from Bowdoin College in Economics and Russian. She serves on several nonprofit boards and speaks Mandarin and Russian.

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Amid groundbreaking political reforms and the largest mass migration in human history, China created over 3,800 new towns to house its burgeoning urban population and sustain rapid economic growth. Driven by marketization, global trade, inter-city competition, and an exponentially growing real estate industry, this continuous urban expansion represents the most extensive urbanization initiative in history. Contemporary Chinese new towns have emerged as a national campaign to reimagine the Chinese city and reshape the global geo-economic landscape. This talk examines four decades of Chinese urbanization through the lens of urbanism and utopianism. Case studies—including the Suzhou Industrial Park, Shanghai's One City and Nine Towns, and prototypical eco-cities—illuminates fundamental issues of economic vitality, cultural identity, environmental sustainability, and socio-spatial dynamics. Ultimately, the talk explores the complex interplay between space production and social transformation within the context of neoliberalism and globalization.

Speaker: Zhongjie “Jeffrey” Lin is Benjamin Lin Presidential Professor of Urban Design at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, where he serves as Head of the Urban Design program and directs the Future Cities Initiative. An internationally renowned expert in urban planning and design, Dr. Lin has published numerous books on Asian architecture and cities, including Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan (2010/2023), Vertical Urbanism: Designing Compact Cities in China (2018), and Constructing Utopias: China’s New Town Movement in the 21st Century (2025). He was the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Abe Fellowship, and three Graham Foundation awards.

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Paper 1 : Optimal Payment Levels for Reference-Dependent Physicians

Abstract: Prospective payment policies, which set a fixed payment for a bundle of services regardless of providers’ actual costs, are widely used across sectors. However, when the fixed payment level deviates from providers’ familiar, preexisting revenue, the introduction of such policies may induce behavioral distortions if providers exhibit reference-dependent preferences. This study investigates the optimal payment level under this policy by leveraging the healthcare context. We develop a collective model of medical decision-making and incorporate physicians’ reference-dependent preferences into this collective framework. Our structural estimates reveal that both patients and physicians play active roles in medical decisions, with physicians placing 3.5 times more weight on perceived losses than gains. The fixed payment level, by shaping physicians’ perceptions of gains and losses, crucially affects both treatment and welfare outcomes. Through welfare analysis, we derive the optimal payment level that reduces healthcare expense while maintaining patient health benefits.

Speaker:
Wei Yan is an Assistant Professor at the School of Finance, Renmin University of China. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the National University of Singapore. Her research in health economics studies the interactions among healthcare providers, patients, and insurers, with a focus on understanding how differing incentive structures and information asymmetries between these key players affect their decisions and generate inefficiencies in healthcare markets.

Paper 2: Fear and Risk Perception: Understanding Physicians' Dynamic Responses to Malpractice Lawsuits

Abstract: Using linked health insurance claims and malpractice lawsuit records from a Chinese city, we study how lawsuits shape physicians’ behavior. After lawsuits, physicians practice more defensively—rejecting high-risk patients, reducing surgeries, and increasing diagnostic tests and traditional Chinese medicine—without improving outcomes. The effects spread to unaffected departments and fade in eight weeks. Evidence suggests psychological rather than financial drivers: similar responses regardless of hospitals’ prior exposure or litigation outcomes; reactions to patient deaths vary with the recency of the lawsuit; and responses intensify after violent incidents against physicians. Overall, lawsuits trigger short-lived, fear-driven defensive medicine.

Speaker: 
Jia Xiang is Assistant Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Penn State in 2020. She was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Harvard School of Public Health from 2020 to 2021. Her areas of expertise include Industrial Organization, Health Economics, and Applied Microeconomics. Her work has been published in The Rand Journal of Economics.

This talk examines how age and generational differences shape smartphone adoption patterns in South Korea, one of the world's most rapidly aging societies. Using discrete-time hazard models, the analysis investigates whether digital divides reflect temporary life stage effects or persistent generational differences that accompany cohorts throughout their lives. Preliminary results reveal striking heterogeneity both across and within age cohorts, suggesting that neither age nor cohort membership alone fully explains adoption patterns. Motivated by these findings, the talk concludes by introducing an age-period-cohort framework designed to separate the distinct effects of aging, different formative experiences (cohort effect), and changing environment (period effect) on technology adoption.

Speaker:

Jinseok Kim is a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) and the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL). His research examines economic decision-making and technology adoption through the lens of behavioral and applied microeconomics. Using econometric modeling and experimental approaches, he studies consumer behavior, innovation diffusion, and the interaction between policy, markets, and demographic change. His work contributes to understanding how psychological factors and institutional contexts shape economic choices and the adoption of new technologies.

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Continuity of medical care is widely observed, but it is often difficult to disentangle patients’ intrinsic preferences from system-imposed switching costs. In this webinar, Dr. Yuli Xu discusses a study that uses the Chinese healthcare setting, where patients can freely choose physicians at each visit and flexibly switch across hospitals and departments, to isolate patients’ value of physician continuity.

Estimating a discrete choice model, the study shows that patients strongly prefer to see the same physician despite minimal institutional barriers to switching, indicating an intrinsic preference for continuity. The study also examines how physicians’ temporary leave affects patient behavior, using a stacked difference-in-differences design. A physician’s absence leads to significant reductions in patient visits, both within the physician’s department and across other departments in the same hospital, with no substitution toward other hospitals and no detectable effects on health outcomes. Patients return to their original physicians once they resume practice. Moreover, patients with more severe conditions incur higher spending when forced to see a new physician. Overall, the findings demonstrate that patients place substantial intrinsic value on physician continuity, even in a healthcare system with highly flexible provider choice.

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Yuli Xu joins the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2025-2026 academic year. She recently obtained her Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on Labor and Health Economics, with particular interests in how female labor force participation and fertility decisions are influenced by labor market institutions and past birth experiences. In her thesis, "Gendered Impacts of Privatization: A Life Cycle Perspective from China," she demonstrates that the reduction in public sector employment has widened the gender gap in the labor market while narrowing the gender gap in educational attainment. She also finds that this structural shift has delayed marriage among younger generations.

In another line of research, Yuli examines the effects of maternity ward overcrowding. She finds that overcrowding reduces the use of medical procedures during childbirth without negatively impacting maternal or infant health. While it has no direct effect on subsequent fertility, she shows that mothers, especially those with a college degree, are more likely to switch to another hospital for subsequent births after experiencing overcrowding. During her time at APARC, Yuli will further investigate patient-physician relationships in the Chinese healthcare system, where patients have considerable flexibility in choosing their doctors at each visit. She will explore the persistence of these relationships and examine how patients respond when their regular doctors are temporarily unavailable.

Yuli also holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of International Business and Economics in China.

In February 2024, the South Korean government announced an expansion of medical school enrollment by 2,000 students to address physician shortages, prompting widespread opposition from the medical community. On February 19, 2024, over 90% of trainee doctors—representing approximately one-third of physicians at major teaching hospitals—resigned and launched a nationwide walkout that lasted until August 2025. This 18-month walkout constituted a major workforce shock in a universal, single-payer system and created a rare opportunity to evaluate effects on mortality, health care use, and spending. Hear from Prof. Park as he presents the results of a study on the impacts of the walkout.

Using a difference‑in‑differences design, the findings reveal significant increases in 30‑day and 90‑day in‑hospital mortality and in weekly all‑cause mortality. Health care utilization declined across inpatient and outpatient settings, with a greater relative reduction in hospital admissions. Hospitalizations dropped primarily for simple and general conditions, whereas admissions for complex conditions remained stable. Mean spending per hospitalization rose substantially, and spending per outpatient visit increased modestly. There was little evidence of systematic substitution of care from teaching hospitals to non‑teaching facilities or primary care settings. Overall, the nationwide trainee doctor walkout in South Korea was associated with higher mortality and lower health care utilization. These findings underscore the vulnerability of health systems to workforce disruptions and highlight the need for policies that strengthen staffing resilience, contingency planning, and communication mechanisms between the government and the medical workforce.

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Sungchul Park is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at Korea University (Republic of Korea). He previously held tenure-track faculty positions at Drexel University (United States) and Ewha Womans University (Republic of Korea). As a health economist and health services researcher, he studies how to design better health care systems that deliver high-quality care at a reasonable cost while ensuring equitable access. His research evaluates the value of health care by assessing both costs and patient and population health outcomes and investigates payment and care delivery reforms, with an emphasis on value-based care. He also analyzes how emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence and digital health, affect cost, quality, access, and efficiency in health care. In addition, he compares health system performance across high-income countries, particularly OECD members, to identify policies that improve care and well-being.

Beneath Xi Jinping’s grand slogans of a “Chinese dream” and a “shared future for humankind,” there are internal tensions, debates, and competing interests that continue to shape China’s approach to the world. Through the lens of domestic politics, nationalism, and regime insecurity in China, Weiss will examine the evolving and contested landscape of what “China” wants. The talk will conclude with policy implications for the United States, prospects for peaceful coexistence, and the future of international order.

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Jessica Chen Weiss is the David M. Lampton Professor of China Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and the inaugural faculty director of the Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs (ACF) at SAIS. From August 2021 to July 2022, she served as senior advisor to the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department on a Council on Foreign Relations Fellowship for Tenured International Relations Scholars (IAF-TIRS). Weiss is the author of Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations (Oxford University Press, 2014). Her research appears in International Organization, China Quarterly, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, Journal of Contemporary China, and Review of International Political Economy. With commentary in the New York Times, Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Los Angeles Times, and the Ezra Klein show, Weiss was profiled by the New Yorker and named one of Prospect Magazine's Top Thinkers for 2024. Weiss is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis and previously the Michael J. Zak Professor for China and Asia-Pacific Studies at Cornell University and an assistant professor at Yale University. She founded FACES, the Forum for American/Chinese Exchange at Stanford University. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, she received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego.

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This talk examines how gender and gender inequality shape global talent migration, with a focus on flows to the United States. Conceptualizing gender as both an individual attribute and a structural condition, An shows how macro-level inequalities and micro-level aspirations jointly organize migration pathways. Using South Korea as a case study, the analysis demonstrates that women migrating to the U.S. are more educationally selective than men, suggesting that gender inequality drives women's talents abroad. The talk also introduces comparative work on Korea and Taiwan that investigates gendered return patterns among U.S.-trained PhDs.

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Minyoung An is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and the Stanford Next Asia Policy Lab (SNAPL). Her research investigates how gender shapes global talent flows and the career trajectories of highly skilled workers. Using large-scale datasets and mixed methods, she examines educational selectivity, gendered return migration, and transnational academic linkages. Her work advances understanding of how gender inequality structures pathways of skilled migration and global talent circulation.

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