【主讲】Joy Chen (博士，斯坦福大学经济系)
【主题】State Formation and Bureaucratization: Evidence from Pre-Imperial China
【时间】2018年12月21日 (周五) 10：00-11：30
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼702室
【语言】英文
【摘要】How does one build a centralized bureaucratic state? A dominant view is that wars incentivize rulers to directly extract resources, thereby increasing state capacity. The Chinese empire, one of the earliest states to develop a centralized bureaucracy, can provide useful insights. Using hand-collected data, I present the first systematic evidence on patterns of wars, state-building and activity of political elites in pre-imperial China, and argue that they do not support the “war-makes-states" theory. Instead, I postulate that war can dampen state-building: when military threat is large, rulers need to incentivize agents to defend against invasion by giving them residual claims to the land. Then, I demonstrate increasing activity of non-nobles in state administrations, and argue that human capital is an important channel for state-building as it reduces the cost of administrative appointments. Furthermore, I postulate that increased productivity and incidence of civil unrest contributed to the increase in human capital by improving commoners' access to and incentives for learning. I develop a model to formalize these claims, and test the model's predictions in light of historical examples and data. I find that bureaucratic rule is more likely to transpire in regions that face less military threat, and when agents have weaker political connections.
