主讲人：
Jamesdaniel Harris（Visiting Fellow, University of Tokyo）
主持老师：
（北大经院）赵一泠
参与老师：
（北大经院）管汉晖、周建波
（北大光华）颜色、李波
（清华大学）徐志浩
时间：
2024年12月5日（周四）
12:00-13:30
地点：
北京大学经济学院302会议室
主讲人简介：
Jamesdaniel Harris received his BA in Economics, and in Political Science, summa cum laude, from Cornell University. Returning to academia after a career in the financial industry, Dr. Harris received his Doctorate in Economic History from the London School of Economics. He is the author of the forthcoming book,
Shanghai's Early Sovereign Debt Markets: A Quantitative Financial History (London: Palsgrave-Macmillan, 2025)
. His current research topics include a data-based financial history of Shanghai's early equity markets, analysis of private property rights institutions in Republican China, and game theoretic approaches to analysing costly effort provision.
摘要：
Whether institutional quality during the late-Qing and republican eras should be regarded as exceptionally weak or relatively strong has remained an open question within economic history, with both views (weak: Ma 2011, Chen 2012, Leung 2023,Wang et al 2024; strong: Strauss 2004, Bian 2005, Zanasi 2006, Huang 2001, Bin Wong 2009, von Glahn 2016) receiving support. The inherently imprecise definition of institutional quality, as well as the inherently difficult nature of standard historical research, which typically relies on modern-period researchers "looking backwards" at often incomplete or poor-quality historical evidence, both lead to a continuing debate in the literature. In this paper, we avoid these methodological issues by observing contemporaneous investor revealed preferences to analyse contemporaneous views on domestic institutional quality. We construct an extensive financial dataset including (i) municipal bond prices, (ii) equity share prices, and (iii) dividend payout rates, containing comparative data on domestic Chinese and extraterritorial government and private securities. Late-Qing/republican Shanghai's unique institutional environment allows us to interpret contemporaneous investor behaviour as indicative of views on the relative strength of domestic institutional quality.
