中国人民大学企业与组织研究中心

组织经济学Seminar

【2012S02】

组织经济学（Organizational Economics）Seminar由中国人民大学企业与组织研究中心（CFOS）主办。CFOS的宗旨是，利用现代经济学方法研究中国的企业、政府、市场和非营利组织的重大问题，推动企业理论、契约理论和制度经济学的研究与教学。关注CFOS，请访问http://CFOS.ruc.edu.cn。

时间：2012年3月28日（周三）12：00－13：30

地点：明德主楼734会议室

主讲：马驰骋

主题：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.