The doctoral students of our College organized the CESD Bookworms Reading Conference. This event aims to allow students to broaden the international academic vision and improve their research writing. The activity received strong appraisal and support from the leaders and faculty of our College.

The reading conference is planned to be launched once a month, focusing on both theory and practice.

The first session was held on the afternoon of April 22 in the conference room of our College. The theme of the event was: "How to do a normative double-difference thesis? - A detailed evaluation of development zone policies", and it was mainly based on the paper "Place-Based Policies, Creation, and Agglomeration Economies: Evidence from China's Economic Zone Program" published in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy in 2019.

About 120 teachers and students participated in both offline and online modalities of the event. In his opening speech, Professor Liu Binglian congratulated the students for their enthusiasm and expressed his good hopes for the students' future and their scientific research.

Through an in-depth interpretation of the literature, Lu Haiyong presented the empirical methods and analysis, model setting, and data source.

After the presentation, Vice Dean Li Lanbing organized a paper discussion, which included both teachers and students.