时间：2023年4月12日（周三） 12:00-13:30

地点：明德主楼729会议室

主持人：胡思捷

主讲人：张晓鸣

题目：Awakening Latent Human Capital: the Opening-up and Entrepreneurship in Modern China

内容简介：

While human capital is a strong determinant of economic development in almost all time periods, its function for the Industrial Revolution has been controversial. When the first wave of industrialization swept around the globe, local elites well versed in their traditional education were often viewed as the very antithesis of what industrialization needed. To resolve this puzzle, we study this question in the context of China's first-ever full-scale exposure to Western influence, using an 1840-1904 prefecture-level panel dataset. By utilizing a novel bibliometric measure as a proxy for the historical stock of human capital, we show that book density is a significant and positive predictor for modern firm creation upon the opening of treaty ports in China. Robustness checks such as alternative measures and an instrumental variable approach confirm this pattern. Finally, by merging data with the Civil Service Examination (keju), we shed light on the mechanism and test how keju affected the re-allocation of talent when new entrepreneurial career options emerged: it was the human capital outside of the civil servants that was mobilized into industrial entrepreneurship.

主讲人简介：

张晓鸣，香港大学经济与工商管理学院博士，现任浙江大学“新百人计划”研究员。研究领域包括经济史与组织理论等。研究涉及经济史、量化历史、政治经济学等，尤其关注中国早期复杂社会的兴起与衰落、科举制度的社会影响、古代官僚组织的选任与激励设计等议题。