Purpose Economic theories on structural change focus on factors such as fluctuations in relative prices and income growth. In addition, China's reform and opening up has also been accompanied by increasing openness, significant fluctuations in investment rates, and frictions in the labor market....

What happens to wage inequality when a country begins to trade and industrialize? I construct new wage series for China from 1858 to 1936. I collect the nominal wages from the records of the China Maritime Customs, and estimate real wages for unskilled and skilled workers using new...

This paper provides the first estimates of housing price movements for Beijing in late pre-modern China. We hand-collect from archival sources transaction prices and other house attribute information from the 498 surviving house sale contracts for Beijing during the first two centuries of the...

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...

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...