Title 1: Introduction to Financial Technology AI Methods for Risk Feature Extraction in Financial Scenarios

Speaker: Yuan Xianzhi, Distinguished Professor of East China University of Science and Technology and Sun Yat-sen University; National High-Level Talent; Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Financial Engineering and member of the editorial board of many domestic and foreign academic journals. He has served as Chief Scientist or Head of Business R&D in many industry financial technology and digital technology companies. He has published more than 160 professional papers in SCI and SSCI academic journals, and has published many monographs and 2 university professional textbooks on financial technology.

Abstract: From the perspective of integrating theory with practice, this paper introduces how to construct an extraction framework for highly relevant (effective) risk features and carry out practical applications in the context of big data for structured and unstructured data, based on the combination of financial technology and AI algorithms and real scenarios.

Title 2: A bad (local) government is more fearful than a tiger: how railways constrain a mining firm’s performance in 1912

Speaker: Fu Tong, Professor and Doctoral Supervisor of Guizhou University; Regional Editor for Asia of Managerial and Decision Economics; Associate Editor of International Review of Financial Analysis and International Review of Economics and Finance; Guest Editor of Energy Economics and Tourism Economics. His research aims to develop new institutional economics and ethical economics, focusing on economic development, corporate finance and environmental regulation. He has published dozens of papers in international renowned journals such as Annals of Tourism Research and Ecological Economics.

Abstract: Humans have built railways to substitute rivers or other transportation to drive economic development during the last 200 years; in this paper, we argue that railways in a developing country such as China function as a shock to traditional economies and generate huge economic profits and then change local governance for firm development. By employing our unique data about the initial railways (operated in 1911) and mining firms (in 1912), we conduct regression discontinuity estimation to document that a mining firm in a county with proximity to railways relative to rivers has a sharp decrease in mining variety, size and coal outputs. This confirms that local governments’ expropriation leads railways to be less efficient than rivers that railways are expected to substitute. Moreover, we show that proximity to railways facilitates a mining firm’s taxes and rents more significantly than performance. These evidence jointly show that a bad local government would play a grabbing hand on railways for firm development.

Date & time: 10 April 2025, 09:30 - 12:00

Venue: B408, Zhixin Building, Central Campus, Shandong University