Political science · UC Riverside

Siqi Chen.

PhD Candidate / All But Dissertation

Exploring the political economy of data, firms, and trade.

I study how cross-border data regulation shapes multinational firms’ decisions and international trade.

Riverside, California

schen642@ucr.edu
Professional portrait of Siqi Chen in a white blazer against a blue background
Siqi ChenUniversity of California, Riverside
International political economyCross-border data governanceComputational social science

01 / Research

Working papers &
research in progress

Current projects on data governance
and the international political economy.

Under reviewAugust 2025 – present

Measuring Cross-border Data Regulations

Under review at Social Science Computer Review

A ten-dimensional framework and an LLM-based measurement pipeline for cross-border data regulation, covering 116 countries from 1981 to 2023.

Research summary

This project systematizes more than 200 legal documents, distinguishing localization mandates, conditional transfer mechanisms, and discretionary state authority while accounting for statutory exceptions and overlapping instruments.

A six-model LLM-as-judge pipeline in Python uses anchored scoring rubrics and structured JSON outputs to construct the Cross-border Data Restriction Index. Validation includes cross-model reliability (ICC = 0.791), human benchmarking (r = 0.83 across 53 texts), and jurisdiction anonymization tests.

Methods: LLM-based measurement · Text as data · Measurement validation

Working paperApril 2025 – present

Cross-border Data Restriction and Firm-Level Market Exit

A theory of bilateral selection between multinational firms and host governments, tested through an event-study design around Vietnam’s 2018 Cybersecurity Law.

Research summary

Firms weigh the compliance costs of data protectionism against their outside options, while governments selectively accommodate firms aligned with industrial policy priorities. The framework draws on firm heterogeneity, New New Trade Theory, and state–multinational corporation bargaining.

The empirical design defines exposure by industry data intensity and estimates heterogeneous exit patterns using firm, year, and multinational firms’ home-country fixed effects, company-clustered standard errors, pre-trend tests, and robustness checks.

Methods: Event-study difference-in-differences · Firm-level panel analysis

Working paperFebruary 2025 – present

Cross-border Data Restriction and International Trade

A sector-level study of how data restrictions affect international trade, treating data as a factor of production across collection, storage, and transfer.

Research summary

The theoretical framework maps firms’ compliance choices—including building data centers, purchasing foreign affiliates, and contracting local providers—to predictions about host-country service exports and imports.

The analysis combines two-way fixed-effects panel models with estimators robust to heterogeneous treatment effects (FEct, IFEct, Matrix Completion, and CSDID). Sectoral analyses use UN Comtrade and UN ServiceTrade (BPM6) data, with lagged country-level controls and country-clustered standard errors.

Methods: Panel regression · Heterogeneous treatment effects · Sectoral analysis

02 / Teaching

Teaching
Experience

Teaching Assistant
University of California, Riverside

  • American Politics
  • Globalization and Development
  • Comparative Political Behavior
  • Politics and Economic Policy: International Relations
  • Regulation: A Political Perspective
  • International Relations
  • The Politics of International Trade, Finance, and Development
  • Administrative Politics and Theory: Compliance
  • Latin American Politics
  • Latin American Politics
  • Politics of the Underdeveloped World
  • Introduction to American Politics

03 / Fellowship

Fellowship