Field

Applied Theory

Contact

work@shangen.li

Welcome to my research webpage!

I earned my Ph.D. in Economics from the Zürich GSE in 2022 and am currently affiliated with the Zürich Center for Market Design.

Working papers

Optimal Design of Climate Disclosure Policies: Transparency versus Externality, 2024

[arXiv]

Does a more transparent climate disclosure policy induce lower emissions? This paper examines the welfare implications of transparency in climate disclosure regulation. Increased disclosure transparency could result in a larger equilibrium externality, but never leaves the firm worse off. Consequently, mandating full disclosure is no different from maximizing the firm’s private benefit while disregarding the ensuing externality. Transparency beyond binary disclosure is necessary only when the firm holds private information about its incentives for emission reduction. I provide conditions under which focusing on threshold disclosure policies entails no loss of generality.

Strategic Exploration for Innovation, 2021

[arXiv]

This paper introduces a framework to study innovation in a strategic setting, in which innovators allocate their resources between exploration and exploitation in continuous time. Exploration creates public knowledge, while exploitation delivers private benefits. Through the analysis of a class of Markov equilibria, we demonstrate that knowledge spillovers accelerate knowledge creation and expedite its availability, thereby encouraging innovators to increase exploration. The prospect of the ensuing superior long-term innovations further motivates exploration, giving rise to a positive feedback loop. This novel feedback loop can substantially mitigate the free-riding problem arising from knowledge spillovers.