Essays on Culture, Human Capital and Development in China

Abstract

My dissertation focuses on the history and culture of modern and imperial China. It comprises three distinct chapters each focusing on a different subject. Chapter 1 examines how textile production shaped and continues to shape attitudes towards women as reflected in the sex ratio and in attitudes towards female labor market participation in today’s China. Chapter 2 studies the Imperial Examination System and the effect of the Literary Inquisition during the Qing period. Chapter 3 studies the phenomenon of ‘Dragon Babies’ documenting the factors that have shaped this modern manifestation of tradition cultural beliefs. In Chapter 1, I test the hypothesis that emergence of historical textile production led to an increase in gender equality. I exploit exogenous variation in historical textile production at the county level to casually identify the effect of textiles on gender equality past and present. I find that historical textile production is positively correlated with female labor participation, and negatively correlated with sex ratio imbalances and sex-specific parental investment. My results are robust to various robustness checks, propensity score matching, instrumental variable analyses, and micro-level analyses. I identify cultural transmission as a possible channel of the persistence effect of historical textile production on today’s gender equality and gender norms. In Chapter 2, I use a semiparametric matching-based difference-in-differences estimator to show that the persecution of scholar-officials led to a decline in the number of examinees at the provincial and prefectural level. To explore the long-run impact of literary inquisitions I employ a model to show that persecutions could reduce the provision of basic education and have a lasting effect on human capital accumulation. Using the 1982 census I find that literary inquisitions reduced literacy by between 2.25 and 4 percentage points at a prefectural level in the early 20th century. Prefectures affected by the literary inquisition had a higher proportion of workers in agriculture until the 1990s. In Chapter 3, I study why China suddenly exhibited a large surge in births–a 50% increase in 2000 relative to 1999–in the 2000 Year of the Dragon by disaggregating birth rates at the city level. I define the dragon effect as a relative jump in birth rates compared to the trend. Prior to 2000, Asian nations with large numbers of ethnic Chinese — but not China — exhibited strong dragon effects. I exploit the uneven economic growth of regions in China to understand the emergence of the dragon effect. I find the dragon effect was most pronounced in rapidly developing cities with higher incomes, higher average education, and greater employment prospects. A micro-level analysis also suggests the dragon effect is positively correlated with educational attainment and income.