Publications

Awakening Latent Human Capital: the Economic Opening-up and Entrepreneurship in 19th-century China (joint with DUAN Li) Journal of Development Economics, 2026, 176:103659

Information Foundations of State Capacity: Evidence from the Imperial Bureaucracy of China. Social Forces, 2025.

From Powerholders to Stakeholders: State-Building with Elite Compensation in Early Medieval China (joint with Joy Chen and Erik Wang) American Journal of Political Science, 2025, 69(2): 607-623.
--Honorable Mention, Charles Tilly Best Article Award in Comparative and Historical Sociology given by the American Sociological Association.

Discretion, Talent Allocation, and Governance Performance: Evidence from China’s Imperial Bureaucracy (joint with Kevin Zhengcheng Liu) Journal of Development Economics, 2025, 172: 103391.

Does Anti-Corruption Enforcement Trigger Bureaucratic Slack in China? The Moderating Effect of an Administrative Reform (joint with Tu Wenyan and Zheng Xiangyi) Problems of Post-Communism, 2025.

Hedging Desperation: How the Confucian Clan as an Internal Financial Market Reduced Cannibalism in Historical China (joint with Zhiwu Chen and Zhan Lin) Journal of Comparative Economics, 2024, 52(2): 361-382.

Publications

Work papers

The More You Know, the Less You Learn: Information Monitoring and Political Decision-Making Bias within China’s Imperial Bureaucracy (with Cao Xianqi)

Work in progress

Task Complexity, Disciplinary Sanction and Dynamic Incentive Provision in Imperial Bureaucracy (joint with Zhiwu Chen, Jin Li, and Zhan Lin)

From God to Father: the Ritual Reform of Western Zhou Dynasty (1046-771 BCE) (joint with Yuqi Chen)