Yasheng Huang keynote speaker

Yasheng Huang is an associate professor in the area of international management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He joined MIT in 2003. His previous appointments include assistant professor at the University of Michigan, associate professor at Harvard University, and consultant to the World Bank.

Professor Huang’s research focuses on international business, political economy, and institutional issues. His published book, Selling China (Cambridge University Press, 2003) examines the institutional drivers of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China.

Unlike many other studies of FDI in China, this book shows that some of the inefficiencies of China’s financial and legal institutions have served to drive up FDI inflows. The principal effect of these inefficiencies is a lowering of the average level of competitiveness of domestic firms, which creates a number of propitious conditions for foreign firms.

Huang is the author of Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, a history of economic reforms in China chronicles three decades of economic reform in China and documents the critical role that private entrepreneurship played in the Communist nation’s “economic miracle.”

Professor Huang is extending this way of looking at FDI-examining the competitiveness of domestic firms-to other countries by analyzing the institutional environment for local firms and entrepreneurship.