【主讲】Bai Ying Ph.D Candidate (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
【主题】Farewell to Confucianism: The Modernizing Effect of Dismantling China's Imperial Examination System
【时间】2014年4月11日 (周五) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼801室
【语言】中文
【摘要】Imperial China employed a civil examination to select scholar bureaucrats as ruling elites. This institution created a negative incentive to adopt Western technology by establishing modern enterprises and studying overseas. Using prefectural-level panel data for the 1896-1910 period, this study compares the effects of the chance to pass the civil examination on the establishment of private firms adopting Western technology before and after the abolition of the examination system. Its findings show that prefectures with a higher quota of successful candidates tended to establish more such firms and send more people to study overseas once the examination system was abolished. As higher quotas were assigned to prefectures whose agricultural tax in the Ming Dynasty exceeded 150,000 stones, we adopt a regression discontinuity design to generate an instrument to resolve the potential endogeneity, and find the results to remain robust.
