Speaker:Bai Ying, assistant professor, Department of Economics, Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK

Date:April 5, 2016

Time:3:00 p.m.- 4:30 p.m.

Location:B423 Juxian Hall, Zhixin Building, Central Campus

Sponsor:the School of Economics

Abstract:

Imperial China employed a civil examination system to select scholar bureaucrats as ruling elites. This institution dissuaded high-performing individuals from pursuing some modernization activities, such as establishing modern firms or studying overseas. This study uses prefecture-level panel data from 1896-1910 to compare the effects of the chance of passing the civil examination on modernization before and after the abolition of the examination system. Its findings show that prefectures with higher quotas of successful candidates tended to establish more modern firms and send more students to Japan once the examination system was abolished. As higher quotas were assigned to prefectures that had an agricultural tax in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1643) of more than 150,000 stones, I adopt a regression discontinuity design to generate an instrument to resolve the potential endogeneity, and find that the results remain robust.

Bio:

Bai Ying, assistant professor of Department of Economics in Chinese University of Hong Kong and Doctor of Social Sciences in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research fields are development economics, economic history and political economy. Dr. Bai has published many papers in top international magazines, such as Econometrica, Journal of the European Economic Association, Review of Economics and Statistics.

For more information, please visit:

http://www.view.sdu.edu.cn/new/2016/0330/79123.html

Edited by: Liu Huan