We study the effect of (declining) Confucian social norms on human capital investment and savings rates in China. In our simple two-period model, parents have the option to invest in either a risk-free asset or the human capital of their child. We assume that social norms, and thus enforcement...

What made finance develop in the West but not in China? We argue that long before modern finance, China chose to rely on the kinship-based Confucian clan, whereas the West chose the corporate entity combined with impersonal instruments, to deal with the challenges of interpersonal risk sharing...

We hypothesize that besides technology and resource expansion, risk-mitigation improvements pushed the Malthusian limits to population growth in pre-industrial societies. During 976-1850 CE, China’s population increased by elevenfold while the Confucian clan emerged as the key risk-sharing...

How does a society hedge the most atrocious states of nature? Survival cannibalism persisted across societies and until recently. We document that in historical China the Confucian clan, which acted as an internal financial market providing its members with the fundamental functions of finance...