Hi! I am a PhD student at the Department of Political Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
My research interests lie in the political economy of development, with a particular focus on foreign aid effectiveness and allocation, colonial legacies on foreign aid, aid accountability, and the use of experimental and computational methods.
My geographical focus is on South Asia and often get in trouble with several South Asian languages. I am currently working on Formations of Trust,
a project that documents historical narratives of foreign aid in Pakistani newspapers.
Previously, at the University of Chicago, I was honored to work with Prof. Tyler Williams
on the political economy of the mass production and circulation of Ibn-e-Safi's crime novels and the publishing industries in Pakistan and India, and the paper is available here.
In my early projects, I worked on the social and political situations of Tibetan Catholics
and conducted ethnography
along the Yunnan-Tibet border in China under the supervision of Prof. Theodore Pulcini.
I graduated with a BA (Hons.) in Political Science and Religion from Dickinson College,
whose commitment to liberal arts education has forever urged me to find a balance between humanities and sciences.
I also hold a MTS in Religion and the Social Sciences from Harvard University,
and a MA in South Asian Languagues
from The University of Chicago.
For more information, please reach out to me at shuyanh2@illinois.edu or michaelhuangshuyan@outlook.com.
Research
Working Paper: Trust Matters: The Impact of Aid on Parliamentary Incumbent Reelection in Pakistan (R&R at Review of International Organizations)
This paper examines how foreign aid from different donors affects the reelection chances of incumbents in Pakistan, emphasizing the role of public trust in the donor.
Working Paper: Navigating the Minefield: Identifying De-Risking Posture in Implementing Chinese Aid in Response to Security Threats (submitted)
This paper argues that Chinese aid adopts a deliberate de-risking posture in response to heightened security salience: implementers re-site projects away from identity-salient locations and policy banks soften financing features most likely to trigger backlash. Leveraging the July 5, 2009 Urumqi riot as an exogenous shock, I combine geocoded Chinese aid with mosque locations and estimate difference-in-differences plus a local difference-in-discontinuities design. Post-2009, projects in Muslim-majority countries proximate to Xinjiang are 9–17 pp less likely to be placed near mosques (1–10 km). In parallel, policy banks reduce collateralization for mosque-proximate projects in proximate countries, consistent with curbing “debt-trap” narratives at religiously salient sites; protest exposure around projects also falls post-2009. Together, these patterns show that location and finance adjust jointly to mitigate risk.
Working Paper: The Colonial Origins of Uneven Aid Allocation: How Colonial State Integration Affects Contemporary Aid Allocation in Tribal Areas of Pakistan
This paper links colonial state integration to contemporary subnational aid allocation in Pakistan’s tribal belt. Using an original geo-referenced dataset of tribes’ “fighting men” circa 1910 and instrumenting militarization with precolonial monsoon volatility (1700–1858), the study estimates the causal effect of colonial state integration on present-day aid disbursements. Reduced-form results show that more volatile precolonial monsoon is associated with substantially higher aid today, consistent with volatility lowering historical militarization and increasing subsequent aid needs. The 2SLS estimates indicate that a one-unit increase in log fighting men reduces log aid by roughly 4.3–4.8. Mechanism tests show that more militarized tribes were (i) less proximate to colonial railways, (ii) currently less accessible to cities, and (iii) exhibit lower current development, consistent with thinner colonial and contemporary state integration in militarized areas.
Working Paper (with Jung Mun Park): Does Religious Identity Shape How People See Democratic Backsliding?
Using original survey data in India, we explore whether religious identity influences public perception of democratic erosion, focusing on attitudes toward institutional capture and authoritarian leadership.
Working Paper (with Fanxi He): Riding with the Norms: The Istanbul Convention and Mothers’ Investments in Female Child Health
This paper examines how international human rights treaties can shift local gender norms and shape rights outcomes. Focusing on Turkey’s 2011 signing of the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention—the first legally binding instrument to prevent and combat violence against women—we test whether the Convention’s normative signal affected mothers’ investments in their daughters’ health. Using Turkish Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from 2013 and 2018, we exploit variation across birth cohorts around the signing date and estimate a difference-in-differences model comparing female and male children. The results show that girls born after May 2011 have, on average, 0.33 standard deviations higher height-for-age $Z$-scores relative to boys of the same birth cohort, even after controlling for region, household, and maternal characteristics. This improvement is strongest among children born in the second half of 2011, consistent with an immediate normative response by mothers whose pregnancies overlapped with the Convention’s signing. Complementary analyses reveal that mothers with daughters became more supportive of women’s political representation after 2011, suggesting that the Convention temporarily raised women’s sense of empowerment and shifted gender-related expectations within families. The findings highlight the signaling power of international women’s rights treaties: by reshaping local perceptions of women’s status, they can indirectly enhance female children’s early-life outcomes, even before full policy implementation occurs.
Working Paper (with Tianhong Yin): Predicting Repeated Disputes: Resolved Statements in Persistent Conflicts
Leveraging archival sources of Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani leaders' public speeches during the 1962 Sino-Indian and 1965 Indo-Pakistani wars, this study investigates whether resolved language from warring parties predicts long-term post-war conflict management.
Other Work
The Making of the World of Espionage: A Brief Political Economic Analysis of the Popularization of Ibn-e-Safi’s jāsūsī Novels in 1950s Karachi
