Can culture mitigate conflicts triggered by economic shocks? In light of the extraordinary emphasis that Confucianism places on subordination and pacifism, we examine its role in possibly attenuating peasant rebellion within the historical context of China (circa 1651–1910). Our analysis finds...

Based on a unique farm survey, this article intends to shed new light on the intriguing relationship between administrative land reallocations and the development of land rental markets in China. We find that the two alternative mechanisms of allocating arable land tend to be substitutes where...

type="main" xml:lang="en" <p>A farm survey conducted in a prosperous Chinese county (Wuxi) in the Lower Yangzi region in the 1930s shows that a ‘vent’ existed for surplus farm workers to obtain off-farm migrant employment and that the slack in farming created by this migration process attracted...</p>

The effects of commercialization and migration in traditional agrarian economies such as China's during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been a subject of ferocious debate. Using data from Manchuria on soybean cultivation and exports, we employ difference-in-differences and...

By providing more public goods (irrigation), collective agriculture can deal with negative weather shocks more effectively. Yet, collective institutions are fraught with problems of work incentives, excessive grain procurement, and the like, which in one extreme historical instance had resulted...

A paradoxical feature of China's land reform of 1946–1952 is that it was conducted far more radically in the north, where land tenure relations were far less unequal, than in the south where inequality of land tenure was distinctly more acute. That landlords could only be identified in south...