Professor Shang-Jin Wei’s New Achievement is Published on NBER: Mobilizing Green Support through Digital Technology | Academics

Release time：2025-08-08    

In today's increasingly severe global climate challenge, how to promote green action and how to get a wider group involved? This is an inevitable question for anyone who is concerned about a sustainable future. Recently, the research achievement coauthored by Shang-Jin Wei, Academic Visiting Professor in Finance and Economics of FISF and Tenured Chair Professor at Columbia University, Jianwei Xing, Tenured Associate Professor in Economics at National School of Development, Peking University, Jiayin Hu, Researcher of Institute of Digital Finance, Peking University, and Eric Zou, Assistant Professor in Business Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, was published on NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research), revealing to the world an inspiring true case of digital platform in China.

Professor Introduction

Shang-Jin Wei

Fudan International School of Finance

Academic Visiting Professor in Finance and Economics

Tenured Chair Professor at Columbia University

The NBER Working Paper series is widely recognized as the “golden channel” towards top journals. NBER is one of the most influential economic thinktank globally, acting as a hub for Nobel laureates and a key reference source of macroeconomic analysis and assessment for governments worldwide and international organizations.

• How can a digital platform plant real trees?

The paper entitled Mobilizing Green Support through Digital Technology takes the popular public welfare program “Ant Forest” as the research subject, and analyzes how it combines games with environmental actions to turn daily low-carbon behaviors into actual green achievements.

Since the initial launch in 2016, Ant Forest has attracted over 700 million users to participate who have planted a total of 500 million trees, making it one of the largest digital environmental programs worldwide.

• What has been found in the research?

Through empirical research on big data, the author team has found that:

In cities with more evident ecological environment improvement, users show a significantly higher level of enthusiasm in participating in “Ant Forest.”

Behind this phenomenon is a psychological mechanism called “green experience”: the visible improvement of environment can stimulate people’s love for nature and thus encourage them to take environmental actions elsewhere.

Apart from the positive stimulation within the platform, most users mention two key factors of “gaming experience” and “inner warmth,” which have been driving them to keep participating.

More importantly, users participating in Ant Forest are both more environmental and more active: they are more willing to support other public welfare programs on the platform, and use services within Alipay Ecology more frequently.

• Green transformation is not just idealism.

This research tells us that: digital platforms can totally become the engine to push forward the win-win solution of environmental sustainability and economic value. Lowering the threshold via technological device and igniting willingness to act with emotional resonance is a nonnegligible link in the path of green transformation in the future.

The researcher conducted by Professor Shang-Jin Wei and coauthors is not merely a dissection of China’s digital program, but more an in-depth insight into the mobilization mechanism of global green action. The publication of the paper once again displayed the professional depth and realistic care of FISF scholars on the international academic stage.

[Link to the original paper: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5368479]