International Relations

My research agenda in IR centers on how China’s growing economic power translates into its global influence and how this translation affects the dynamics in the US-China competition and reshapes the structure of global conflict and cooperation. I am especially interested in China’s strategies in allocating its global capital flows (including broadly-defined aid, foreign direct investment, and bilateral monetary arrangements, etc.). My research finds that one of the strategies China uses to expand its global influence is to build networks via bilateral economic ties and generate spillover effects among countries across issue areas. Whether or not the expansion of China’s global influence is at the expense of the US influence depends on specific areas. For example, on monetary issues the gain of China’s influence is not necessarily the loss of the United States.

Most recently, my research focus is mainly on globalization and global governance, especially the roles played by international organizations and great powers.

Political Methodology

I have conducted research on quantitative methods with a focus on Time-Series Cross-Sectional (TSCS, a.k.a., long panel data) analysis. TSCS is one of the most important and commonly used data structures in IR studies, which reflects the complexity of world politics where actors’ choices are interdependent in dimensions of time and space. My methodological research seeks to improve existing methods and develop new approaches to model serial and spatial interdependence in political and social processes. My research agenda is organized around three major tasks:

1) to improve statistical inference by modeling and correcting for serial and spatial correlations;

2) to improve statistical prediction by making a better use of information on dynamics and heterogeneity in TSCS data;

3) to make causal inference with TSCS data by relaxing SUTVA and other basic identification assumptions that are likely to be violated by repeated measures and spatial interference.

Please see SELECTED WORKS of mine for more details, and refer to RESUME for the complete list of my publications.