About me

Hi, my name is Xueping Sun and I am currently a Lazear-Liang postdoctoral scholar at Stanford GSB. I obtained my PhD in 2022 from the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm University. Here is my Curriculum Vitae.

My research areas are political economy and applied microeconomics. I strive to understand how political institutions can foster or obstruct economic prosperity, particularly in China. My work on the political economy of China takes a special focus on the “doer”— local bureaucrats, firms, citizens and researchers. I develop novel methods to exploit unstructured data, create new measurements, leverage institutional features to enable empirical investigations, and combine them with applied microeconomic methods to improve our understanding of the political accountability of economic policymaking.

I focus on three main issues. The first one concerns the political institutions of innovation. I investigate how political incentives and constraints drive the creation and implementation of economic policies, and how the interplay between government and the market shapes innovation. The second issue examines how political institutions affect scientific production, with a particular focus on how research institutions and research resource allocation matter for the careers and research agenda of researchers. The third issue considers the role of information control in shaping political accountability in the digital age. I explore how social media and AI-driven censorship technology affect the information flow between citizens and the regime and its implications for bureaucratic accountability in China.