主讲人：
魏金霖（香港科技大学助理教授）
主持老师：
（北大经院）赵一泠
参与老师：
（北大经院）郝煜、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11月7日（周四）
12：00-13：30
地点：
北京大学经济学院305会议室
主讲人简介：
Jinlin Wei is an Assistant Professor at the Social Science Division at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He holds a PhD in Economics and an MRes in Economics from the Department of Economics, University of Warwick, an M.A. in Economics from the National School of Development, Peking University, a B.Sc. in Physics from the School of Physics, Peking University, and a B.A. in Economics from the National School of Development, Peking University. He seeks to understand economic development in history from a spatial perspective.
摘要：
How do banks affect innovation when there exist liquidity constraints? Between 1750 and 1825, country banks in England and Wales provided short-term loans to clients due to legal restrictions. Using a new district-level panel dataset on patents and banks, covering almost six hundred registration districts, I find that better access to banking services increased patenting. My baseline estimation, which includes district and year fixed effects, shows that a one standard deviation increase in banking access increased patenting by 15.6% of a standard deviation. I establish a causal relationship by constructing instrumental variables that utilize variations in the money supply and the locations of historical post towns to predict the growth of country banks. My findings suggest that country banks and their London agents contributed to the formation of a national banking system that channelled surplus credit from the agricultural sector to the industrial sector that lacked credit. Country banks increased the number of patents acquired by their borrowing clients, who were mainly industrialists and merchants. Banks lowered the costs of procuring working capital by providing short-term credit. The effects of banks were larger in districts subject to tighter credit constraints and lacked access to the London money market.
