Yue Lin

About Me

Welcome! I am a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis on Political Economy through Berkeley Economy & Society Initiative. I am also a Data Science & AI Fellow at Berkeley Data Science Lab and a non-resident Hans J. Morgenthau Fellow at University of Notre Dame’s International Security Center.

My dissertation, titled Championing Economic National Security in a De-Globalized Era, won the 2025 Best Doctoral Dissertation Proposal from Academy of International Business. I investigate a new transnational political risk: host country governments invoking national security to restrict cross-border investment. This shift reshapes the competitive and nonmarket strategy landscape for firms operating across geopolitical divides. In the job market paper, I trace the political origins of this trend in the U.S. Congress and analyze the nonmarket strategies multinational enterprises (MNEs) use to manage these challenges. In the dissertation, I also explore how societal stakeholders—especially consumers—respond, and how their reactions shape the cross-border diffusion of frontier technologies. Empirically, I combine original data, experiments, and qualitative interviews to explore these questions. From 2023 to 2025, I interviewed 21 business leaders, former government officials, and policy experts while conducting fieldwork in China, Japan, and the United States.

For research funding support, I thank Berkeley Economy & Society Initiative, Berkeley Global, International & Area Studies, Citrin Center for Public Opinion Research, Helsinki Geoeconomics Society, and Institute for Humane Studies.

Prior to my Berkeley journey, I worked at the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Institute of New Structural Economics at Peking University. I received an M.A. in International Economics and International Relations from Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. I earned a B.Soc.Sci. in Government and International Relations from Hong Kong Baptist University, where I was awarded a national scholarship (top 0.05%) and graduated top of my cohort.

You can access my CV here. (Last updated: May 2026)

Research Interests

• Substance: Geopolitics, Economic Security, Congress, Multinational Enterprises, Firm Strategy
• Methodology: Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Experiments in Social Science, Qualitative Interview

Publications

Lin, Y. (2026). “Nationality Backlash: Multinational Corporations in the Shadow of Home-Host State Rivalry.” Online View at Law and Geoeconomics.

Lin, Y. (2025). “How Foreign Investment Fuels Social Conflicts in Africa.” In S. M. Mitchell, V. Nchotu, & L. L. Atanga (Eds.), Legalization of Human Rights in Africa: The Institutionalization of Laws Prohibiting State-Sanctioned Violence and Torture (pp. 149–170). Routledge.

Working Papers

1. Striking but Fleeting: How Economic Security Shapes Global Firms’ Socio-Political Strategy [Job Market Paper]
   Abstract

   Why do governments increasingly invoke national security to criticize foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs), and how do affected firms respond? I argue that economic securitization (ES) is a political discourse tool, activated when host country legislators face competitive elections in constituencies exposed to foreign economic competition. The phenomenon is striking but fleeting: it intensifies under joint electoral and economic pressure and recedes once that pressure passes. Yet, some ES bills acquire institutional traction through chamber passage, signaling a higher probability of future regulation. In response, foreign MNEs adjust their nonmarket portfolios accordingly. Under early-stage ES, firms substitute away from elite-targeted lobbying toward society-oriented environmental, social, and governance (ESG) engagement that helps rebuild local legitimacy. Once ES bills gain institutional traction, MNEs retrench from the most visible social-pillar engagement and reduce lobbying intensity. Using an original dataset of 5,484 U.S. legislator-session observations (2005–2024) paired with a firm-year panel of 591 foreign MNEs operating in the United States (2013–2024), I find empirical support for the conditional electoral activation of ES risk and the two-stage corporate response. Twenty-one interviews with senior corporate and policy professionals further reveal how MNEs choose among different strategies in response to politicized investment environments. Overall, this paper identifies politicians as a new source of host country investment risk, and offers managerial guidance for global firms operating in increasingly politicized contexts.

2. Sink or Swim Together? How the Rule of Law Affects Cross-Border Investment
   • Invited to submit full paper
   • Finalist for 2026 UNCTAD-AIB Award for Research on Investment and Development
   Abstract

   International investment has facilitated economic cooperation among states and multinational enterprises (MNEs), yet it constantly suffers from regulatory uncertainties and institutional hazards. How does the rule of law (RoL) in targeted markets affect MNEs’ cross-border investment? I argue that the RoL has differential effects on different types of cross-border investment. In particular, strategic mergers and acquisitions (M&As) establish new global value chains (GVCs) or strengthen existing ones to foster economic collaboration, which are less observed in the financial M&As that are purely profit seeking. Moreover, weak RoL may deter more strategic M&As due to GVC linkages that can transfer spillover effects to home countries. Based on data from the International Country Risk Guide and Capital IQ for 140 countries (2010-2021), I find that law de jure significantly promotes M&A values only when law de facto is at a middle or high level. Overall, this paper explores the differential impacts of law on cross-border investment, calling for emerging markets and new democracies to improve institutional quality and law enforcement capacity for sustained global economic cooperation. The paper offers also practical managerial implications for corporate leaders to enhance legal astuteness.

3. Geopoliticized Industrial Policy: Power Rivalries and the Allocation of Government Subsidies (with Boliang Zhu)
   Abstract

   We examine the revival of industrial policy in the United States amid an evolving global geopolitical environment. We argue that federal industrial policy reflects a dual logic: it functions as an instrument of statecraft to enhance strategic and technological advantages vis-à-vis global rivals, while simultaneously serving as a vehicle for domestic political distribution. Using a novel firm-level dataset that combines information from Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker and Bureau van Dijk’s Orbis Historical database, we analyze the allocation of federal subsidies across more than 2 million firm-year observations from 2010 to 2021. Our results show that firms more exposed to Chinese import competition and those operating in industries targeted by the “Made in China 2025” initiative are significantly more likely to receive federal support, while political connections also play a critical role. We develop a comprehensive framework for understanding the new wave of industrial policy and demonstrate that contemporary U.S. industrial policy is shaped by both global strategic rivalry and domestic political considerations.

4. Probabilistic Record Linkage at Scale: A Human–AI Interactive Pipeline for Firm-Level Research (with Lingyu Jack Fuca and Boliang Zhu)
   Abstract

   Research on private organizations increasingly depends on integrating heterogeneous data sources that rarely share common identifiers, such as financial statements, patent filings, lobbying records, and ownership registries. Resolving which records refer to the same firm is therefore a foundational empirical step, yet existing approaches force a trade-off between scalability and accuracy. Purely deterministic methods miss true matches in messy data, while fully automated probabilistic methods generate false positives that propagate silently through downstream analyses. In this paper, we propose a human-in-the-loop pipeline for large-scale firm record linkage built upon the Splink package, with diagnostic transparency as the organizing principle. Specifically, we combine a three-tier tokenization scheme for company names with recall-prioritizing blocking rules, and embed researcher review with auditable diagnostics throughout model training, feature selection, and threshold tuning. We further illustrate the pipeline by linking Good Jobs First’s Subsidy Tracker to Bureau van Dijk’s Orbis firm universe, showing that the workflow generalizes to a broad range of record linkage tasks. The result is a computationally efficient, transparent, and replicable workflow that lowers the barrier to large-scale data integration across disciplines.

Ongoing Projects

1. Securitizing the Sophisticated: Technology, Public Opinion, and Economic Security

2. For Whose Sake? Corporate Motivations Behind Economic National Security
   • Nominated for Best Paper Prize and PhD Paper Prize, Strategic Management Society 2025 Conference

3. When Regulation Bites: The Asymmetry of Technology Statecraft and U.S.–China Venture Capital Investment (with Jin Hyung Kim)

4. Navigating the Chasm: How Political Signal Incongruence Shapes Corporate Nonmarket Strategy (with Jin Hyung Kim)

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