How did eighteenth-century China manage to provide public goods nationwide despite its low tax rate? We construct a prefecture-level panel dataset from 1738 to 1820 and examine the effectiveness of the provision of public goods by the state granary system and elite services in mitigating price...

We examine the different functions of the government and of local elites in eighteenth-century China by considering their responses to grain price fluctuations, which were the largest shocks to traditional agrarian society. Descriptive evidence has indicated that both the government and the...

Structural transformation is a key feature of economic development. Traditional literature attributes it to changes in the sectoral composition of consumption. Different from it, we argue that the "servici fication" of investment goods, which is induced by investment-specific technological...

To what degree were Chinese financial markets integrated with the rest of the world prior to the 1949 Revolution and to what extent was the Chinese foreign exchange market efficient during this period? We estimate silver points for the Shanghai market from 1905 to 1933 to answer these questions....

Does culture, and in particular religion, exert an independent causal effect on long-term economic growth, or do culture and religion merely reflect the latter? We explore this issue by studying the case of Protestantism in China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries....

Our paper provides a comparative perspective on the development of public primary education in four of the largest developing economies circa 1910: Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). These four countries encompassed more than 50 percent of the world's population in 1910, but remarkably few...

Can Protestantism make people more honest? If yes, what does this mean for corporate behaviors and economic performance? Marshalling large and unique datasets on the 1920 Protestant diffusion in China, and the financial reports of about 125,000 Chinese industrial firms from 1999 to 2007, we find...

To what degree were Chinese financial markets integrated with the rest of the world prior to the 1949 Revolution and to what extent was the Chinese foreign exchange market efficient during this period? We estimate silver points for the Shanghai market from 1905 to 1933 to answer these questions....