北大经院工作坊第833场
State-building or State-weakening? The Consequences of Military Control in Medieval China
经济史工作坊
主讲人：陈雨新（中国人民大学经济学院讲师）
时间：2024年3月21日(周四)12:00-13:30
地点：北京大学经济学院301会议室
主讲人简介：
陈雨新是中国人民大学经济学院讲师。她于2019年获得斯坦福大学经济学博士学位，研究兴趣包括经济史、政治经济学、制度经济学，论文发表或即将见刊于Journal of Economic History、American Journal of Political Science、Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization等期刊。
摘要：
A key challenge to state-building in conflict-prone societies is the proliferation of autonomous armed groups. As governments seek to enhance monopoly of violence, the consequences of centralization deserve scholarly attention. We argue that as centralization weakens the upper elites in these groups, it improves government control. But such efforts could also undermine efficiency and the discipline of the lower ranks, thereby eroding coercive state capacity. Empirically, we leverage a centralization reform in China’s Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE) after a civil war, using unique data on military rebellions, soldier mutinies, battle outcomes, and civilian uprisings. Difference-in-differences estimates reveal that centralization successfully reduced local generals’ rebellions against the regime, but led to increased lower-rank mutinies within the military and more civilian uprisings. It also worsened battlefield performance. While research on state capacity has focused on its extractive and administrative dimensions, these findings deepen our understanding about another important aspect: the coercive dimension.
北大经院工作坊第834场
Inference on Union Bounds with Applications to DiD, RDD, Bunching, and Structural Counterfactuals
计量、金融和大数据分析工作坊
主讲人：Xinyue Bei（PhD student at Duke University）
主持老师：（北大经院）王熙
参与老师：
（北大经院）王一鸣、王法、刘蕴霆
（北大国发院）黄卓、张俊妮、孙振庭
（北大新结构）胡博
时间：2024年3月22日（周五） 10:00-11:30
地点：北京大学经济学院107会议室
主讲人简介：
Dr Xinyue Bei is an econometrician working primarily on inference in partially identified models with applications in structural models, sensitivity analysis, and counterfactual analysis. She is also interested in hypothesis tests in nonstandard situations, with applications to normal mixtures and regime switching, sample selectivity, skew normal distributions, and serial correlation.
摘要：
A union bound is a union of multiple bounds. Union bounds occur in a wide variety of empirical settings, from relaxations of the difference-in-differences parallel trends assumption to counterfactual analysis with partially identified structural parameters. In this paper, I provide the first general and systematic study of inference on these kinds of bounds. When the union is taken over a finite set, I propose a confidence interval based on modified conditional inference. I show that it improves upon existing methods in a large set of data generating processes. When the union is taken over an infinite set, I consider the set defined by moment inequalities, as is common in practice. I then propose a calibrated projection based inference procedure that generalizes results from the moment inequality subvector inference literature and is computationally simple. Finally, the new procedures give statistically significant results while the pre-existing alternatives do not in two empirical applications, the sensitivity analysis in Dustmann, Lindner, Schönberg, Umkehrer, and Vom Berge (2022) and the counterfactual analysis in Dickstein and Morales (2018).
北大经院工作坊第836场
Chinese Machinery Export and African Industrialization: Big Push or Pollution Haven?
生态、环境与气候变化经济学工作坊
主讲人：Yatang Lin（The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology）
时间：2024年3月22日（周五）10:00-12:00
地点：北京大学国家发展研究院承泽园329教室
主讲人简介：
Yatang Lin received her Ph.D. degree in economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is currently an Assistant Professor at Department of Economics, Division of Environment and Sustainability, Division of Social Science. Her research and teaching interests include environmental and energy economics, urban economics, international trade and development economics.
摘要：
The recent decades have witnessed a notable surge in machinery imports from China to African economies. Our paper aims to analyze the causes and local effects of these imports. Notably, we find that China's efforts to address overcapacity in energy-intensive industries have played a significant role. City-sectors facing urgent capacity elimination requirements have experienced an approximately 10% increase in exporting machinery value, particularly to African countries characterized by weaker environmental regulations and abundant resources. Using instrumental variables based on China's annual list of eliminated capacity, we find mixed effects of machinery imports on African countries. While they contribute to increased value added and productivity in recipient sectors, the impact on employment is limited. Treated regions experience a shift in employment from agriculture to manufacturing and services, with the magnitudes larger for service. Meanwhile, they also experience heightened pollution levels. This serves as a cautionary tale for the role of massive machinery transfer in African industrialization, highlighting the need to pay attention to job creation and sustainable development.
供稿：科研与博士后办公室
美编：薏米
责编：度量、雨禾、雨田
