Haikun Zhan

Haikun Zhan, PhD candidate from the University of Melbourne will present her paper: Central Administration and the Rise of Local Institutions: Evidence from Imperial China.

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Abstract:
In this paper, I study whether a strong centralized state facilitated the development of local institutions in Imperial China from 1000 A.D. to 1900 A.D. I exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the state administrative capacity in the local area induced by regime changes. Using a prefecture-level panel dataset, I find that local institutions flourished when the state administrative capacity was strong and prevalent. This is likely because a strong centralized state could better co-opt these local institutions, granting local institutions political power. Further investigation reveals that regions with relatively weaker state administrative capacity did not receive more public goods from the central state. This illustrates an important development issue: places with weak centralized states lack both state direct public goods provisions and local institutions to coordinate public goods provision and social capital formation and might face more developmental difficulties.