学术报告新

James Kai-Sing Kung is inaugural Griffin Chair Professor of Economic History at the Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Melbourne. His research interests are steeped in the institutions and culture and their relationships to long-term economic growth in China (socalled “deep-rooted” factors in comparative development), and the political economy of development in China. His publications have appeared in both economics and political science journals such as The Quarterly Journal of Economics, The American Political Science Review, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Economic Journal, The Journal of the European Economic Association, and other specialised journals in the areas of growth, development, and history. He was President of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies in 2021 and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic History and Regional Science and Urban Economics

For centuries, the Chinese organized economic activities among those bonded together by a common patrilineal ancestor known as clan. To explain its growth, we enumerate its hallmark – ancestral halls – across China for 800 years (c. 1136-1935) and leverage a historical natural experiment — the Ritual Reform of 1536. We find that nearly all 18,685 ancestral halls (98.7%) were erected after 1536 because, by allowing everyone to worship their first ancestor (shizu), the reform expanded the size of organized lineages considerably and heightened the demand for a physical structure designated for ancestral worship. Specifically, ancestral halls were mostly erected by commoners, as the reform also allowed commoner families with an official-ancestor to build one. Across China, disproportionately more ancestral halls were built in counties more suitable for rice cultivation, because the crop uses more water and clans facilitate cooperative efforts in irrigation construction.