Guo (Jerry) Cheng

Incoming PhD in Polisci @UCSD

An explorer in interdisciplinary research of policy-driven economics and political science.

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Fatty Fries, a British Shorthair cat, resting on a bed — Fatty Fries British Shorthair · site co-director

About

I am an incoming PhD student in Political Science at UC San Diego. My main research interests are broad in international topics — including international relations, organizations and institutions, trade, and political economy — and my work is policy-oriented.

I approach these questions with interdisciplinary tools from political science and economics, aiming for research that is theoretically grounded and useful for understanding real-world policy.

Beyond research, I love furry animals — especially British and American Shorthairs and red pandas. I love music; here is a collection of what I enjoy: 果子狸のMusic Player. My favorite singers are Celine Dion, Jessie J, and Sohyang — they are my beacons. I also love watching sports, and here is my visualization project TennisVis to honor the GOAT, Novak Djokovic.

Research

Selected work

Publication

On the Performance-based Legitimacy of Financial Action Task Force: A Quantitative Exploration

with Bo Wen · Regulation & Governance (2025), online first

Note: In the published text, the terms “mediation/mediate” should be read as “moderation/moderate” to denote the correct statistical concept.

Download PDF Slides Data (FATF 4th-round ratings, as of Jul 2025) Publisher (DOI)

How legitimate is Financial Action Task Force (FATF)? We address this question with cross-country evidence spanning performance-wise aspects—standards, evaluation, strategy. FATF’s legitimacy needs strengthening. Standards-wise, compliance to FATF’s Recommendations generally contributes to both FATF’s and external effectiveness proxies, yet the latter has much weaker evidence. Granularly, FATF’s Recommendations pose challenges for good-faith developing states, since capacity constraints hinder compliance and effectiveness conversion. Evaluation-wise, the effectiveness appraisal may be biased due to heavy reliance on compliance ratings, evidenced by weak correlations with external corruption control and financial transparency indicators. Strategy-wise, though enhanced follow-up boosts persistent compliance, the dominantly punitive strategy system is detrimental to good-faith yet low-capacity states. Theoretically, we build an extended framework on Mitchell’s theory by deepening the analysis of effectiveness and justifying its applicability to non-binding institutions. We also enrich the dialogue on the legitimacy of international organizations by presenting a quantitative, objective approach using official data.

Working papers

Neoclassical Growth Revisited: Why Are Policy Functions Myopic in Closed-Form?

with Sergio Salas

Draft PDF

In learning macroeconomic dynamics, it is common to start with a version of the Neoclassical Growth Model (NGM) that admits closed-form solutions. This involves analyzing a special case with: i) log utility, ii) a Cobb–Douglas production function, and iii) full depreciation. While the existence of a closed-form solution under these assumptions has long been established, the implications for households and the role of their forward-looking behavior in deriving the results are seldom explained. This is particularly relevant in connection to the “news” literature, because unlike in a purely Markovian recursive structure, news about future changes in the economic environment—e.g., changes in productivity—generally produce current effects. However, under the special case of the NGM that admits closed-form solutions, news about future changes has no current effects. To understand why this result holds, we present the market approach to solving the problem, where it is revealed exactly what economic forces underlie the fact that agents do not react to news about future changes in wages and interest rates.

Work in progress

A Structural Model of Institutional Competition and Academic Mobility: Evidence from Elite Economics

Thesis

Fertility Outcomes and Preferences in China: A Two-way Causal Analysis

Master’s thesis · supervised by Christina Brown

Thesis record

This study explores the bidirectional causality between fertility preferences and outcomes in China, using the latest two waves of the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS 2018 and 2021). The findings highlight significant implications for two contrasting phenomena observed in the data: 1) A progressive shift from son preference to daughter preference overall across cohorts; 2) A persistent gender discrepancy between fertility outcomes and preferences — actual fertility outcomes are more skewed towards boys than ideal fertility preferences suggest. The shift towards the daughter preference can be attributed to the “girl-updating” mechanism: having girls on average reduces the gender gap in preferences by approximately 0.5 children, while the effects of having boys are less consistent. On the other hand, the gender discrepancy between fertility outcomes and preferences can be explained by two behavioral patterns: 18% of the discrepancy comes from people with a son preference taking more aggressive measures to ensure male offspring, whereas 82% is attributed to the “implicit son preference” among people with a balance preference, who opt for a boy when limited to only one child. Moreover, a dynamic Difference-in-Differences study suggests that during the early stage of birth control policies, urban residents with a balance preference suffer from increasingly stricter constraints of having only one child than their rural counterparts, exacerbating the skewed sex ratio.

Curriculum Vitae

Full CV

As of July 2026

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