Firms in Globalization: Evidence from China
Project Description
This project will only recruit students in their year 3 or year 4 or students who have at least finished the spring term in their year 2 with a background in statistics or econometrics knowledge. Students with prior experience in Stata software (and/or other coding languages) have priority to be admitted. This project will primarily examine the economic behavior of different types of firms, e.g., indigenous firms and foreign invested enterprises (FIEs), in China. The project also requires some analysis by comparing Chinese firms with those from other countries and do quantitative analysis at global level. The primary task is data mining/analysis. The secondary task is complementary data collection and literature review, etc. The main data would be provided to students by professor, though sometimes students need to collect supplementary data to complete the analysis. [Check some examples of my past students' project reports before you decide to apply: available at
https://urop.ust.hk/download and then find "UROP Publications", search for Supervising Professor's name LI, Yao]
Supervisor
LI Yao
Quota
10
Course type
UROP1000
UROP1100
UROP2100
UROP3100
UROP4100
Applicant's Roles
Duties: data mining and data analysis, data collection, literature review, etc. Students are expected to continue the UROP series conditional on satisfactory performance. All students are required to sign the confidentiality agreement before they can use the confidential data provided by the supervisor.

Time commitment: average 10-20 hours per week in summer term and average no more than 10 hours per week in Fall/Spring semester.

Requirement: background knowledge of microeconomics/macroeconomics and statistics/econometrics, as well as the software Stata.

(If a student does not have any prior knowledge of Stata, she/he will need to learn how to use Stata first. The first 6 class notes with movies at the following link https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/stata/modules/ will provide a good starting point.)

Student Eligibility:
--First-time UROP participant is required to have enrolled in a full-time degree-bearing program for at least two semesters at HKUST and attained a minimum CGA of 3.0 for UROP1000 (for summer session only); 3.3 for UROP1100. For those who have completed UROP1000 before, this requirement can be waived.
Applicant's Learning Objectives
Primary: based on Chinese data, understand the characteristics of different types of firms (e.g., pure exporters/pure importers/both exporters and importers; FIEs/indigenous firms) and/or the relations between them as well as their interactions with the rest of the world.

Secondary: obtain more advanced knowledge of the software Stata and quantitative analysis skills.
Complexity of the project
Challenging