Ming-yen Ho

Ming-yen Ho is a Ph.D. candidate in business and public policy at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Ho works in political economy and industrial organization, focusing on how political considerations and firm competition structures shape industrial policy. His current project studies decentralized industrial policy in China, where local governments provide substantial support to local firms in the semiconductor sector. Local governments may have better information than the central government in identifying promising local champions, but they also have incentives to support local firms that may be less efficient nationally. In an industry where firms benefit from learning-by-doing and increasing returns to scale, the proliferation of subsidized local champions competing on the national market may not be ideal from the central government’s perspective. He plans to analyze the tradeoffs and implications of China’s decentralization approach through firm-level shareholdings, financial data, and empirical methods in economics. Ming-yen graduated from the University of Hong Kong with bachelor’s degrees in law and social sciences, and holds an M.A. in analytical political economy from Duke University.