活动预告

The emergence of fintech has greatly changed our daily lives and the business environment. In our coming workshop, we are delighted to invite Dr. Paul Sin from Deloitte to give us an informative overview of the fintech enabled ecosystem. With over 20 years of IT management and consulting experience focusing on the financial services sector, Paul will also share with us his insights on the future development of the fintech industry.

Students who are interested in fintech are most welcome to join and learn about the latest industry development from the professional. 

We use high frequency worker level productivity data from garment manufacturing units in India to study the effects of caste-based social networks on individual and group productivity when workers are complements in the production function but wages are paid at the individual level. Using exogenous variation in production line composition for almost 35,000 worker-days, we find that a 1 percentage point increase in the share of own caste workers in the line
increases daily individual productivity by at least 9 percentage points. The lowest performing worker increases her effort by more than 12 percentage points when the production line has a more homogeneous caste composition. Production externalities, that impose financial costs due to worker’s poor performance on co-workers within her social network, can explain our findings. Our results suggest that even in the absence of explicit group-based financial incentives, social networks can be leveraged to improve both worker and group productivity.

In historical China, because rulers ascribed their legitimacy to a heavenly mandate, natural calamities like earthquakes were seen as signs that the ruler’s legitimacy had been weakened. I therefore proxy legitimacy shock by quake-induced minor shaking (i.e., strong enough to be felt by the population but too weak to cause material damage to persons or objects) and show that it causes significant political instability (as measured by conflict). This effect is much larger in regions with higher levels of ethnolinguistic fragmentation, suggesting that legitimacy shock can serve as a coordination device for overcoming the problems inherent in collective action.