To be qualified for consideration of the awards, the paper must have been presented at the CES Annual Conference 2012. The primary author of the paper must be a graduate student or junior scholar who received a PhD within the last five years. The evaluation criteria include contribution to the literature, innovation of methodology, and relevance to the Chinese economy and the conference theme.

2) Award Screening Process

The award was announced in the CES Annual Conference 2012 - Call for Paper in October 2011. The CES Board of Directors screened 198 papers submitted for the conference and accepted 140 papers to be presented at the conference. All accepted paper authors were informed on March 20, 2012 and urged to submit their full papers for competition of best paper awards if they met the basic qualifications.

Of the accepted paper authors, 28 submitted their papers for the competition. The CES Board of Directors screened the papers and short-listed several papers for the awards by May 20. After double-checking the short-listed authors’ qualifications, we finally determined the winners and announced the results at the closing ceremony of the CES Annual Conference 2012 on May 24, 2012.

3) The Award Winners

Student category:

Honorable Mention: PAN, Yao of George of Washington University for her paper “The Effect of Labor Mobility Restrictions on Human Capital Accumulation in China”.

Winner: QIN,Yu of Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University, for her paper “No Counties Left Behind?: The Distributional Impact of High-Speed Rail Upgrade in China”

Junior scholar category:

Honorable Mention: DONG, Yingying of Department of Economics, University of California Irvine, for her work coauthored with Dennis Tao Yang: “Mandatory Retirement and the Consumption Puzzle in China”. 

Winner: TIAN, Lei of Sun Yat-sen University for his paper “A comparative analysis of different tools of the People’s bank of China in effectiveness”.