中國人民大學企業與組織研究中心

組織經濟學Seminar

【2012S02】

組織經濟學（Organizational Economics）Seminar由中國人民大學企業與組織研究中心（CFOS）主辦。CFOS的宗旨是，利用現代經濟學方法研究中國的企業、政府、市場和非營利組織的重大問題，推動企業理論、契約理論和制度經濟學的研究與教學。關注CFOS，請訪問http://CFOS.ruc.edu.cn。

時間：2012年3月28日（周三）12：00－13：30

地點：明德主樓734會議室

主講：馬馳騁

主題：Culture Matters: Confucian Norms and Peasant Rebellions in Late Imperial China

摘要：This paper seeks to understand the possible effect of a persistent culture on conflict attenuation in the historical context of an agrarian society. We test the hypothesis that, by honoring subordination and imposing shame on violators of the social order, Confucianism effectively attenuated peasant rebellions in the nearly 300 years of China’s last dynastic rule (the Qing Dynasty, circa 1644-1911). While economic shocks, proxied by crop failure, do give rise to more peasant rebellions, Confucian norms, measured both by the number of temples built in a county to honor Confucius and his followers and the number of chaste women who sacrificed for their deceased husbands, are found to mitigate the effect of crop failure. In light of the persistence of culture we identify the causal impact of Confucianism by exploiting variation in the number of ancient Confucian sages that our sample counties were differentially bestowed over a long period (from 500BC to 1643), which is highly correlated with Confucian norms in the period of our interest but otherwise unrelated to peasant rebellions.