Lasted for over 1,500 years since its inception and with its singular focus on Confucian classics, the civil examination system in China has been criticized for having held back China’s economic progress at a time when the West had made profitable use of knowledge of Western science and technology to fuel an industrial revolution. The two essays that unify this thesis revolve around this important theme in the economic history of China. By exploring the impact of the abolition of China’s civil exam system on modern economic activities, the first essay is designed to identify the alleged negative incentive effects of the civil exam system on modernization. Using prefecture-level panel data from 1896–1910, I find that prefectures with larger quotas of Xiucai (the successful candid...[ Read more ]

Lasted for over 1,500 years since its inception and with its singular focus on Confucian classics, the civil examination system in China has been criticized for having held back China’s economic progress at a time when the West had made profitable use of knowledge of Western science and technology to fuel an industrial revolution. The two essays that unify this thesis revolve around this important theme in the economic history of China. By exploring the impact of the abolition of China’s civil exam system on modern economic activities, the first essay is designed to identify the alleged negative incentive effects of the civil exam system on modernization. Using prefecture-level panel data from 1896–1910, I find that prefectures with larger quotas of Xiucai (the successful candidates of the lowest level exam) had both established more modern firms and sent more students to Japan after the system was abolished, suggesting, if indirectly, that the civil examination system did constitute an institutional obstacle to the rise of modern science and industry in late imperial China. Using the abrupt demise of the Northern Song Dynasty in 1127 as a shock and the resulting large-scale migration (of around 5 million people during 1127-30) fleeing to the south, the second essay investigates the long-term effect of migration on the economic prosperity of the receiving economy in contemporary times. In order to enhance their survivability vis-à-vis the native population, and with the civil exam system being firmly in place in the Ming and Qing dynasties to select scholarly officials, the migrants invested more in education. The result was an unwitting increase in human capital, as is evidenced by the economic prosperity of the host prefectures in the year 2000, using both GDP per capita and average nighttime luminosity as pertinent measures.