主 题：Spirit of Innovation and Economic Development: Evidence from the Qing Dynasty of China

时 间：2023年04月14日（星期五）下午16:00
地 点：威廉希尔6-210会议室
主持人：曹思力
【摘要】

With the literary inquisition in the Qing Dynasty of China as an exogenous shock on innovation, we empirically study the effect of spirit of innovation on long-term economic development. Through our empirical investigations, we attempt to contribute to the explanations of two fundamental puzzles in Chinese history: (1) China was the global leader in science and technology before 1700, why this advantage did not lead to an Industrial Revolution (the Needham puzzle); (2) why China declined in the late Qing Dynasty. With a Difference-in-Differences (DID) strategy, by exploiting the variation of the literary inquisition across region and over time, we find that the literary inquisition reduced the number of scientific and technological innovations by at least 55–73% in affected regions in the short term and further had a negative effect on the long-term economic development of those regions in the Qing Dynasty.

主讲人简介：王学博，上海财经大学威廉希尔经济学副教授。他于2018年获得香港中文大学经济学博士学位。他的主要研究领域是应用微观经济学，包括劳动经济学、发展经济学和计量经济史。其研究成果发表在Journal of Development Economics等国际一流学术期刊。