Jen Burney Bio

Jennifer (Jen) Burney is a Professor in Global Environmental Policy and Earth System Science in the Doerr School of Sustainability. Her research focuses on the coupled relationships between climate and food security – measuring air pollutant emissions and concentrations, quantifying the effects of climate and air pollution on land use and food systems, understanding how food production and consumption contribute to climate change, and designing and evaluating technologies and strategies for adaptation and mitigation among the world’s farmers. Her research group combines methods from physics, ecology, statistics, remote sensing, economics, and policy to understand critical scientific uncertainties in this coupled system and to provide evidence for what will – or won’t – work to simultaneously end hunger and stabilize earth’s climate. She earned a PhD in physics in 2007, completed postdoctoral fellowships in both food security and climate science, and was named a National Geographic Emerging Explorer in 2011; prior to joining the Doerr School, she served on the faculty at UC San Diego's School of Global Policy and Strategy and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Shanjun Li Paper

Supply Chain Structure and the Rise of China’s Electric Vehicle Industry

This paper examines how supply chain structure contributed to the rise of China’s electric vehicle (EV) industry. Leveraging comprehensive buyer–seller matched transaction-level data for upstream auto parts and detailed downstream vehicle sales data, we document two salient features of China’s auto supply chain: market thickness and geographic co-location. Thicker upstream markets reduce input prices through intensified competition and improved matching, while proximity between upstream and downstream firms enhances both matching probability and product quality. We develop and estimate a structural model that combines second-score procurement auctions upstream with differentiated-product Bertrand competition downstream. Counterfactual simulations show that China’s supply chain structure, relative to that of the U.S., can explain about half of the EV price gap between the two countries.

Bio

Shanjun Li is the Steven and Roberta Denning Professor of Global Sustainability in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, and a Senior Fellow at both the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Insitute for Economic Policy Research. He directs the Sustainability and Energy Transition Program at Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions (SCCEI). His research focuses on environmental and energy economics, urban and transportation economics, empirical industrial organization, and the Chinese economy. His recent work examines pressing sustainability challenges and the rapid rise of clean energy industries in China, exploring their global implications to support evidence-based policymaking.