華南經濟論壇第286期
題目：中國中世紀商業革命的緣起與后果
時間：2020年11月5日 15:20-16:30
地點：大學城文科三棟415
線上騰訊會議號：793 794 865（密碼：1122）
（線下會議同時線上直播，學生請到現場參加）
主講人： 陳婷 （香港浸會大學助理教授）
主持人：劉愿教授
Abstract:
In the 10th century of Song China (c. 960-1268 AD) on the heels of a commercial revolution, the merchants appealed for their children to be permitted to take the civil exam—the route to officialdom in imperial China. Using a uniquely constructed data set, we show that the variation in commercial tax in 1077 and in the average number of market towns across the 1,185 Song counties has a significantly positive effect on both the number of jinshi holders and the share of these achievers who came from a non-aristocratic background—the two variables we employ to proxy for meritocracy. To cope with the growing demand for exam preparations, the merchants established many academies and printed many books—two strong indicators of the rise of human capital investment behind the emergence of meritocracy. To trace the origin of the commercial revolution, we confirm that an institutional reform—the “Twice-a-year” Tax Reform around 780 AD—that forced upon the emperor of Tang by a sudden military rebellion significantly spurred the commercial development in the areas where the Tang’s central government maintained tax control. We then use the boundary of these effectively taxed areas as a spatial RD design to identify the effects of commercialization on meritocracy. Our empirical analysis sheds light on why commercial revolution emerged so much earlier in medieval China, as well as how it turned Chinese political structure from aristocratic to meritocratic based without developing a representative government like in western Europe.
主講人簡介：
陳婷，香港浸會大學經濟系助理教授，商業分析和數字經濟中心副主任，曾在普林斯頓大學Bendheim Centre for Finance從事博士后研究，2015年獲得香港科技大學社會科學博士學位，2011年獲得香港科技大學社會科學研究碩士學位，2008年獲得中山大學社會學學士學位。她的主要研究領域包括發展經濟學、政治經濟學、房地產經濟學與經濟史。研究成果發表于Journal of Development Economics、Economic Journal、Journal of Econometrics、The Quarterly Journal of Economics、《經濟研究》等期刊。