Imperial Chinese dynasties varied dramatically in elite population outcomes: under the Ming’s eight-rank system, the registered clan grew to over 157,000 members by 1595, imposing catastrophic fiscal costs, while under the Qing’s fourteen-rank system, the registry recorded 16,454 living male clansmen at the end of a comparable period. Conventional wisdom attributes such divergence to rank count; we show that rank count alone does not explain it. Using cross-dynasty comparative analysis of seventeen dynasties and 87,318 individual records from the Qing Yudie (Genealogical Registry), we provide convergent evidence linking demographic control to institutional complementarity—specifically, mandatory demotion combined with examination-based exit—rather than to the number of rank tiers alone. Clansmen recorded with rank or office averaged 2.95 recorded sons versus 0.83 for those without (regression-adjusted: 1.784 sons), a differential closely associated with marriage-market access: 91% of clansmen with recorded rank or office married versus 41% of those without, with controls for marriage structure attenuating the gradient by approximately 84% (a descriptive combined attenuation that includes a small sample restriction; a same-sample two-equation decomposition associates 85.5% of the gradient with the marriage component). The Ming combined rank tiering with no exit mechanism; the Qing combined mandatory demotion with examination-based exit. Institutions work as a package, not as individual policy parameters.
Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of women’s wages in reshaping our understanding of living standards and labour markets throughout history. However, Italy remains largely absent from this literature. This paper contributes at filling this gap by providing the first long-run series of women’s wages in the care economy in Italy. We focus on wetnurses employed by the Ospedale degli Innocenti—Florence’s foundling home—between 1600 and 1914. Drawing on novel archival sources, we construct nominal series of wetnurses’ wages and calculate welfare ratios for Florence that incorporate women’s economic contribution to the household. Our results show that wetnurses’ wages were persistently low but represented nearly 20–25
This paper investigates the relationship between long-term and persistent historical natural disasters and contemporary socioeconomic development. In the context of Chinese history, frequent breaches and course shifts of the Yellow River gave rise to an expansive floodplain region in the North China Plain, covering approximately 250,000 square kilometers. Exploiting the plausibly exogenous spatial variation in historical exposure to Yellow River floods and combining rich historical and contemporary data, we provide evidence consistent with a persistent adverse effect of historical flood exposure: areas historically affected by flooding exhibit significantly lower levels of socioeconomic development today. This pattern remains robust after a set of robustness checks, spatial regression discontinuity, and instrumental variable analysis. The mechanism analysis suggests that cultural norms and capital accumulation are plausible channels through which Yellow River flooding may have exerted long-term economic impacts within the floodplain. We find suggestive evidence that floodplain residents report lower levels of interpersonal trust than residents in unaffected areas. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the persistent threat of flooding may have weakened local residents’ incentives for long-term investment behaviors, particularly in human capital, contributing to lower levels of capital accumulation in these regions. These findings contribute to the literature on historical determinants of contemporary development and offer a novel perspective on the origins of regional economic inequality in modern China.
Does poverty draw farmers into markets through distress sales, or constrain their participation by limiting marketable surplus? Using county-level data from John Lossing Buck’s Land Utilization in China surveys (1929–1933), we construct three measures of agricultural commercialization in Republican China. Across measures and specifications, commercialization is positively associated with farm productivity, and instrumental-variable estimates provide corroborative evidence in the same direction. Productivity is also positively associated with marketable surplus, measured both as a share of output and per capita. Taken together, these patterns are more consistent with a subsistence-constraint interpretation than with distress sales as the dominant explanation. The findings help reconcile competing interpretations of Republican China’s rural economy: markets were widespread, yet participation varied with the capacity to produce beyond subsistence. More broadly, they highlight productive capacity as an important condition for commercialization in poor agrarian economies.
This paper asks whether the concept of path dependence applies to economic history’s own publication record. Using annual citation histories for 1262 articles published between 2012 and 2021 in four economic history journals, I document strong persistence: conditional on journal and publication year, the elasticity of long-run citations with respect to age-two citations is about 0.78. The relationship holds when the outcome is restricted to citations accumulated strictly after the early window, and it is stable across journals, topics and publication cohorts. Observable author and article characteristics explain about a fifth of the variation in early citations; yet, the unexplained component predicts long-run citations almost as strongly as the explained component. Consistent with a visibility channel, articles placed earlier in a journal issue receive more early and more long-run citations. Together these patterns are difficult to attribute to quality differences alone, although unobserved quality cannot be ruled out. Half of the classified citation links in the available network sample come from economics, and two fifths come from formats other than journal articles. The cross-sectional association between conference presentation and long-run citations is imprecise conditional on early citations. The findings are relevant to the use of early citation counts in research evaluation.
