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Weighty Issue
Obesity is a major public health problem and
weight loss is a pervasive personal goal. This
research, published in
Psychological Science
, is the
first to study laypeople’s weight-related beliefs.
Authors Prof Anirban Mukhopadhyay (Marketing)
and Prof Brent McFerran (University of Michigan)
find these beliefs have real consequences –
they predict an individual’s actual body mass
index. Their results suggest that obesity has an
important, pervasive, and hitherto overlooked
psychological antecedent. Follow-up research
is investigating how food marketing companies
actively promote the exercise lay theory. Related
articles in this stream have appeared in the
Journal of Consumer Research
,
Journal of Consumer
Psychology
, and
Journal of Marketing Research
.
Credit Constraints
In a series of papers, Prof Pengfei Wang
(Economics) has shown that credit market
imperfections can translate small economic
downturns to severe financial crises and that
credit market imperfections can lead to asset
bubbles and hence generate self-fulfilling
fluctuations. The macroeconomic data reveal
that asset bubbles driven by excess credit are not
theoretically appealing but empirically necessary
to explain how housing prices and stock prices
influence macroeconomic fluctuations. Related
research articles have appeared in
American
Economic Review
,
Econometrica
,
Journal of
Monetary Economics
, and
American Economic
Journal: Macroeconomics
.
Tracking China’s Aging Population
Prof Albert Park (Social Science and Economics)
in collaboration with researchers from Peking
University, University of Southern California, and
other international partners, conducted a mass
survey of Chinese adults over the age of 45, finding
stark gender differences in howmen and women
age in the developing world. The research combines
socioeconomic data on areas such as employment,
education and consumption, with self-reported
and actual measures of physical and psychological
health offering fresh insights for policymakers and
researchers. First results show that older women are
much more likely to be in poor health than men.
The release of the China Health and Retirement
Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) baseline report excited
much general interest, including summary articles
in
Science
,
TheWall Street Journal
, and
South China
Morning Post
.
TheWider View
School of Humanities and Social Science faculty
members published 13 books and many articles
during the year. One key example was
China’s
Early Modern Economy: A Study of the GDP of the
Huating-Lou Area in the 1820s
by Prof Bozhong
Li (Humanities). The book won two national
prizes: the quinquennial Guo Moruo Chinese
History Prize from the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences, 2012; and the triennial Higher Education
Outstanding Scientific Research Output Award
(Humanities and Social Sciences): Economics,
2013, from the Ministry of Education. Both are
firsts for the Hong Kong academe.
Research Development