群学肄言堂第十四季05期

Awakening Latent Human Capital: the Opening-up and Entrepreneurship in 19th-century China

讲 座 信 息

主题：Awakening Latent Human Capital: the Opening-up and Entrepreneurship in 19th-century China

时间：2023年11月24日（周五）13:30-15:30

地点：浙江大学紫金港西区成均苑8幢1127

概要：The role of human capital in the Industrial Revolution, particularly in late-industrializing countries, has been a central debate in economics. This paper navigates the complexities of this debate by investigating the influence of China's upper-tail human capital, quantified via book creation, in the country's initial industrialization process during the opening-up period in the 19th century. Employing a prefecture-level panel dataset from 1840 to 1904, the study establishes book density, indicative of knowledge endowment, as a significant and positive predictor of modern firm entry following the opening of treaty ports. To understand the mechanism, a critical aspect lies in understanding the Civil Service Examination, keju, an indigenous institution that historically dominated talent accumulation and allocation in China. The keju system largely funneled the nation's brightest minds into government service, potentially limiting their contribution to industrialization. By integrating data with keju, we find that exposure to Western influence mobilized the segment of upper-tail human at the bottom or outside of the keju system into entrepreneurship and economic modernization even before the abolition of keju in 1905. This paper underscores the underexplored role of human capital outside the bureaucratic system in the early modernization of late-industrializing countries and illustrates the dynamics between indigenous institutions and external pressures.

主讲人：张晓鸣，浙江大学社会学系新百人计划研究员

香港大学博士，研究领域为历史政治经济学与组织理论，目前研究议题包括，中古中国的统一与分裂、古代官僚体系的组织学原理、中国早期复杂社会的兴起与衰落等。文章发表或即将发表于American Journal of Political Science; Journal of Chinese Governance; 学术月刊等期刊。

评议人：袁松，浙江大学经济学院新百人计划研究员

华威大学博士，研究领域为发展经济学与经济史。论文发表于Journal of Development Economics 和Journal of Economic History等国际知名期刊。

主持人：李林倬，浙江大学社会学系新百人计划研究员

美国芝加哥大学社会学博士，研究兴趣包括经济社会学和计算社会学中的如下一些议题：垄断问题，生产组织如何应对不确定性，文化类市场的组织结构, 时尚与创新，市场流动性的社会结构，文化系统变革的内生动力等。其研究发表在Poetics, 社会学研究等期刊上。