Book Description

This dissertation contributes toward our understanding of social change and socio-economic development. Chapter 1 introduces multiple key factors driving social change and leading to economic and social development. In Chapter 2 to Chapter 4, by analyzing historical natural experiments, I study the role of information, social interactions, and human capital in social changes, and their relationship with economic and social development. Chapter 2, "Political Information, Social Interactions, and Protest in Late Imperial China", investigates how information and social interactions drive social change by leading to collective actions (protests). A modern communication infrastructure allows information to reach people through the news media, while social interactions are needed to coordinate social movements. The postal system's rapid construction in 1903-1910 in China let newspapers spread information directly to an increasing portion of the population. The change in information diffusion coincided with intensive media attention on revolutionary activities before the Revolution of 1911. I find that the construction of more post offices in a place led to more protests in the years with more reports about revolutionary activities in newspapers. I further disentangle the roles of direct information diffusion and social interactions. I define a village network based on the village's location, the walking time between villages, and the village's dialect group. I build and estimate a game-theoretical model based on the village network. As political information directly changed the villages which had post offices nearby and could receive information, I also find a strong peer effect: a village was affected by its expectation of its neighbors' actions. The peer effect spread the direct impact of political information through social interactions. Chapter 3, "Wartime Social Interactions and Veteran Migration in The Post-American Civil War Era", explores the role of social interactions in social change and economic development after the American Civil War. I focus on temporary social interactions among African American veterans during the American Civil War (1861--1865), and examine the long-term impacts of temporary social interactions on veterans' migration and income in 1870--1900. I find that wartime social networks (veterans from the same company) persistently affected veterans' location choices in the post-Civil War period. By estimating discrete choice migration models, I quantified that the veterans were more likely to move to a county where men from their military company lived. I further show the long-term benefits of living together. Veterans earned higher incomes after the war if they lived in the same county with wartime friends who had higher incomes after the war. Chapter 4, "Temple Destruction, School Construction, and Modern Human Capital in 20th Century China" (jointly written with Shaoda Wang), studies how modern human capital emerged in early 20th-century China and its impacts on economic development. We documented a historical episode known as the Temple Destruction Movement (TDM), during which Chinese local governments appropriated huge amounts of Buddhist and Taoist temple assets to support the modernization of the local schooling system. We found that before the TDM, the initial stock of temple assets was uncorrelated with the levels and trends of human capital development. However, after the TDM started, regions with higher initial stocks of temple assets constructed more modern schools, enrolled more students in modern educational programs, and produced more modern elites.