Rate My Professor Shawn Chen

Shawn Chen is a Senior Lecturer, equivalent to Associate Professor in North America, in the Economics discipline at the UWA Business School, University of Western Australia. He earned his PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2015 and another PhD from Peking University in 2005. His primary research fields encompass public economics, misallocation, development, and growth, with secondary interests in innovation, natural resources and environment, inequality, and the economy of China. Chen's scholarship focuses on the interplay between taxation, development, and state building in developing countries such as China, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and India. He explores how fiscal regimes and political institutions shape tax systems and rent extraction, resulting in production efficiency losses, amplified regional economic and fiscal inequality, policy uncertainty, natural resource curses, corruption spillovers, and weak tax capacity.

Chen has published in prestigious journals including the Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Economic Modelling, International Tax and Public Finance, and China Economic Review. Key publications include 'The Effect of a Fiscal Squeeze on Tax Enforcement: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in China' (Journal of Public Economics, 2017, 331 citations), 'Vulnerability to Tax Enforcement and Spillovers of Corruption: Cross-industry Evidence from China' (Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, 2022), 'Can Land Misallocation be a Greater Barrier to Development than Capital? Evidence from Manufacturing Firms in Sri Lanka' (Economic Modelling, 2023, with Ranpati Dewage Thilini Sumudu Kumari, Sam Hak Kan Tang, and Bei Li), 'What Impairs the Money Machine of VAT in Developing Countries?' (International Tax and Public Finance, 2021, with Harsha Konara Mudiyanselage), and 'VAT Rate Dispersion and TFP Loss in China's Manufacturing Sector' (Economics Letters, 2017). At UWA, he has supervised 21 postgraduate students, with six PhDs graduated. His accolades include the Early-Career and Mid-Career Researcher Awards from the Western Australia Chinese Scientists Association (2017 and 2023), the Best Paper Award at the Annual Public Finance Forum in China (2015), the Michio Morishima Fund from STICERD, LSE (2015), and the Gregory Chow Best Paper Award from the Chinese Economists Society (2005). Ongoing projects address topics like taxational resource curse and land misallocation in China.