演講者簡介 : Ms. Li is currently a Ph.D student at University of Bologna, Italy. Her research fields are Development Economics, Regional Economics, and Quantitative History.
演講摘要 : This paper seeks to understand the historical determinants of political stability (instability) by investigating the role of deeply-rooted centralized bureaucracies and unified political system in ancient China in shaping interactions between citizens and the state nowadays and finding out the channel(s) through which such persistence occur. To avoid the possibility that the positive relationship between historical centralized regimes and contemporary political stability outcomes may be spurious, I control for a rich set of covariates and employ an instrumental variable approach. The results show that historical exposure to centralized bureaucracies significantly and positively explains contemporary political stability: one hundred more years of exposure leads to a 0.06 decrease of anti-government attacks, and reduces anti-government protests by 0.14, while increases the aggregated subjective nationalism index by 0.125. I find that the quality of current local government cannot fully explain the results, while culture represents the main channel through which the effect of historical institutions persists.
