Candela, who joined Binghamton’s faculty as an assistant professor of sociology in 2014, focuses on how people maintained nationalistic sentiments for their native country while migrating to a new one. “I’m looking at their sense of national identity around what it means to be Chinese and have a sense of belonging to China while at the same time carving out a life in another country,” Candela says.

“My goal is to show these histories that get eclipsed,” Candela says. This involves studying people without isolating them to a single nation or culture. Chinese migrants aren’t typically included in the study of Latin American nations, or in the study of Chinese history, so this group is not well known.

Gail Hershatter, a distinguished professor of history at the University of California Santa Cruz, advised Candela while she was a doctoral student school there. Candela has unique qualifications to do this work, she notes, as she is fluent in Chinese and Spanish.

“Her research is quite unique,” Hershatter says, “because most people that are trained to do East Asian history stay in East Asia. They do their research exclusively about China, but she is doing the history of a group that went from China to Peru. They kept really substantial ties to the homeland, and at the same time they were very involved in national events in Peru. And so she’s tracking both of those things. It’s a really transnational story, which is very unusual and hard to do.”

Candela is working on a book about overseas Chinese nationalism drawn from her dissertation. “The challenge is that you actually end up in the dissertation with a lot more questions than you started with,” she says. “And so then the question becomes narrowing down the scope of what you actually want to answer at this moment and finding how the past speaks to the present.”

Candela has travelled to Peru and China in search of answers. She has been approached by residents of Peru who had letters from relatives that they were unable to read because they were written in Chinese. As she translates these personal histories, she contributes to the understanding of these transnational relations in the global sense while also helping individual families better understand themselves and their histories.

“I think she’s a real pioneer,” Hershatter says of Candela. “I think more and more people are going to try and do the work she does.”

In a study published recently by The Journal of Socio-Economics, Yang reports that an aversion to the number 4, combined with a preference for the numbers 6 and 8, may translate into a “surcharge” of as much as 1.4 percent of China’s gross domestic product.

In China, the world’s second-largest economy, superstition plays an important role in the pricing of consumer goods. The number 4 shares the same sound as “death” in Chinese; 6 is a lucky number that represents “smooth”; and the number 8 sounds like the word “prosperity” in Chinese.

It’s not uncommon for a culture to have such preferences, Yang notes: Consider Americans’ aversion to the number 13. The difference is that the Chinese superstition has significant economic implications.

Yang, who grew up in China and travels there several times a year, had made casual observations about the effect of these superstitions in the past. When he set out to test his theory, he hired someone to collect random prices from Chinese shops without telling him what kind of research he was doing. In the end, Yang analyzed more than 11,000 Beijing-area prices of items in five categories: food, electronics and appliances, clothing, real estate and services.

“Through meticulous analysis of the collected data, I conclude that retailers in China could have gained as much as an extra 4.16 percent by manipulating price tag numbers to take advantage of superstitions,” he writes, “which could translate into as much as 1.40 percent of annual GDP in 2007, where these retailer gains are consumer losses.”

Essentially, any time a Chinese retailer changes the price of an item to avoid the number 4, he uses a higher number. The practice leads to higher prices; Yang found that 4 is significantly under-represented and that 8 is significantly over-represented in the final digit of prices.

Previous studies in marketing journals have identified this pattern, but haven’t addressed the winners and losers it creates. “The use of superstitious numbers in pricing and the exploitation of superstition in retail sales is more than a cultural phenomenon,” Yang writes. “Given its ubiquity, the use of superstitious numbers in prices should not be viewed as a mere marketing gimmick either.”

It’s this conclusion that distinguishes Yang’s paper, which was highlighted in the January/Febrary edition of Harvard Business Review.

“Consumers overpay for what they purchase in China in general,” he says. “There’s a lot of profit margin, which means there’s a lot of room for manipulation.”

Yang, whose research primarily focuses on energy and environmental economics, tackled the question of lucky numbers on a lark. He may return to this topic for a future project, though: He’d like to examine consumer purchase patterns as they relate to “lucky” numbers in China.