Shitong Qiao

What are the limits of markets? What moral responsibilities do businesses have? To what extent is individual economic success shaped by personal effort versus social factors? In 'Social Economies,' Lester Hadsell examines these questions across twenty clear chapters, analyzing the connections between economies and society. bit.ly/3R3TFHt

@yisuzhou @KaiserKuo Great question. Discussed this at the end of the paper. Singapore comes close, but not exactly.

Reading this and thinking back to @KaiserKuo's interview with Angela and Alex a few days ago: sinicapodcast.com/p/the-platform…, the assumptions of the platform state are several. One of which is the increasing capacity of the state. I don’t know if you can apply that to just any other countries.

My new paper presents a different model of the platform-state relationship and explains how China eliminated online music piracy within just a few years. Oh, btw, there is no local judicial protectionism regarding music copyright litigation. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

I just returned from a long trip to Japan and China. While I had little time for non-work activities, I enjoyed my discussions with academics, organizations, and policymakers. Two aspects stuck out for me on this trip. First, science is playing an even larger role in organizations and government than ever before. Second, this is especially true in the area of scaling, where Option C Thinking is on the top of many minds (see here: ideas.repec.org/p/feb/natura/0…) Of course, selection bias must be considered, but this has been a consistent factor across all my past site visits.

Ten American cities just joined The Pact of Free Cities – a global coalition of mayors dedicated to protecting democracy even if their national governments don't. More will join soon. What that means for democracy, in my new post 👇 @bpkaracsonyg

New paper on @SSRN with @e_garrett_west, "The Takings Clause Cause of Action," forthcoming in the @StanLRev. Does the Takings Clause have an implied cause of action? If not, does the Constitution speak to the Clause's enforcement? Abstract here and link below!

New article with Alejandro Peña in @IntOrgJournal rethinking world order beyond the West from the bottom-up cambridge.org/core/journals/…

I reviewed the new "Experimental Economics: Theory and Practice" by @Econ_4_Everyone after teaching it for the first time this semester to Columbia PhD students. drive.google.com/file/d/1kUtoP8… @BeckerFriedman @UChi_Economics @UChicagoPress

The Washington University Law Review invites submissions for its 2026 symposium, “The Many Faces of the State.” Proposals (≤1,000 words) due June 30, 2026: symposiums@wustllawreview.org. See attached.

🚨 Coming soon: “The Political Economy of Public Bureaucracy” 🚨 My book is forthcoming in 2026 with @CambridgeUP! A preview of the cover art is below. Thanks to Dan Carpenter, @SeanGailmard, & @jrgingrich for their endorsements! 🙏 More details will follow in future posts. 😊

"The perfect is the enemy of the very good." Joel Mokyr gives some important advice that can be applied to most subjects aside from mathematics – don't expect perfection. He says he does his best, acknowledges what he does not know and moves on. Mokyr was awarded the 2025 prize in economic sciences for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress. Watch our full interview: bit.ly/4bYtmJ2

This NYT report marks the 10th review/interview about my book "The Authoritarian Commons: Neighborhood Democratization in Urban China." I'm grateful that people are still paying attention to everyday life in China. nytimes.com/2026/04/27/wor…

This is probably the best paper I have read about causal reasoning for quite some time. Really a great weekend read! "Causal Persuasion" (Burkovskaya & Starkov) models how much evidence you need to establish vs. rule out a causal link. The result is stark: To prove X causes Y: 1-2 well-chosen variables often suffice. To prove X does NOT cause Y: you must account for every possible common cause. Arbitrarily many confounders. Practically unfalsifiable. This inverts the Humean intuition: in causal reasoning, positive claims are cheap to sell and negative ones are almost impossible to rebut. Now think about what this means for Virtual Cell models. Most perturbation datasets cover a thin slice of the combinatorial space — a few hundred gene knockouts, maybe a few contexts. A model trained on that data can confidently "learn" gene X drives phenotype Y. But if the true structure is X←C→Y , and C was never systematically varied — the model will never see its own confounding. It has no mechanism to distinguish causal signal from correlated noise. The paper formalizes exactly why: the model is a sophisticated receiver that accepts whatever causal story is consistent with the data it's seen. And if the data omits the right confounders, even a "sophisticated" model is manipulable. This is the deepest argument for perturbation diversity. Not just more data, but also more axes of variation. Vary the context. Vary the genetic background. Vary the timing. You're not just collecting samples; you're systematically eliminating alternative causal explanations. This is why we need “scale” the training data with more contexts including cell types, spatial, and temporal variations. Paper: aburkovskaya.com/pdf/causality.…

🚨 Last week, I sat with Profs. @hartzog and @JSilbey to discuss their excellent new paper, "How AI Destroys Institutions." The paper has been downloaded 30,000+ times, and it discusses some of AI's most important negative consequences. Watch our 56-minute conversation below:

Google just mass-published how 34 researchers actually use Gemini to solve open math and CS problems. not benchmarks. not demos. real unsolved problems across cryptography, physics, graph theory, and economics. 145 pages of case studies. here's what actually matters:

🚨 Forthcoming in Econometrica! How does trade liberalization affect developing countries with large informal sectors? Informality fundamentally changes how we think about the gains from trade. (1/5)

🎉 Congratulations to @AnnaFruhstorfer on her new book "Constitutional Change Under Autocracy." 🤩 We are proud to publish it in our Oxford Series in Comparative Constitutionalism. It is a model for comparative constitutional studies, and certain to become an invaluable resource for scholars of constitutional change. 📚 Check out the book here: global.oup.com/academic/produ…. It is now available for pre-order.

The Difference Between "Significant" and "Not Significant" is not Itself Statistically Significant

My article with Hein Goemans and Michael Weintraub is now out at @The_JOP ! See how prospect theory does (and doesn’t) apply to territorial disputes

My latest, with @scottjshapiro: "A world in which the powerful no longer feel the need to justify themselves is not merely unjust. It is barbaric . . . . That world does not have a legal order at all. It has only force, guided by one man’s whims." foreignaffairs.com/united-states/…