Fall 2008                                                                                                               Organizer: Se Yan

Guanghua School of Management                                                                seyan@gsm.pku.edu.cn

Peking University

 

Economic History Reading Group

 

 

Topic 1                          Income Distribution and Inequality  ( I )

 

1. Simon Kuznets, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” American Economic Review, March 1955. [PDF]

2. Peter H. Lindert, “Unequal English Wealth since 1670.” The Journal of Political Economy, December 1986. [PDF]

3. Thomas Piketty, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “Wealth Concentration in a Developing Economy: Paris and France, 1807-1994,” American Economic Review, March 2006. [PDF]

4. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 2003. [PDF]

5. Thomas Piketty and Nancy Qian, “Income Inequality and Progressive Income Taxation in China and India, 1986-2010,” Forthcoming in American Economic Journal - Applied Economics, Vol 1, January 2009. [PDF]

 

Topic 2                          Inequality, Education and Taxation

 

1. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, “The Race between Education and Technology: The Evolution of U.S. Educational Wage Differentials, 1890 to 2005”, NBER working paper, March 2007. [PDF]

 

2. Lawrence Katz and Kevin Murphy, “Changes in Relative Wages, 1964-1987: Supply and Demand Factors,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, (Feb. 1992), p. 35-78. [PDF]

 

3. Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo, “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the US at Mid Century,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, (Feb. 1992), p.1-34. [PDF]

 

4. Kenneth Sokoloff and Eric Zolt, “Inequality and the Evolution of Institutions of Taxation: Evidence from the Economic History of Latin America,” (UCLA, working paper, 2006).  [PDF]

 

5. Chiaki Moriguchi and Emmanuel Saez, “The Evolution of Income Concentration in Japan, 1886-2005: Evidence from Income Tax Statistics”, Forthcoming in Review of Economics and Statistics. [PDF]

 

 

Topic 3                          Recent Progress in Chinese Economic History

 

1. Debin Ma, “Economic Growth in the Lower Yangzi Region of China in 1911-1937: A Quantitative and Historical Perspective”, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 68, No. 2 (June 2008) pp. 385-392. [PDF]

 

2. Robert C. Allen, Jean-Pascal Bassino, Debin Ma, Christine Moll-Murata, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, Japan, and Europe, 1738-1925”, GPIH working paper. [PDF]

 

3. Carol H. Shiue, “Transport Costs and the Geography of Arbitrage in Eighteenth Century China,” American Economic Review, Vol. 92, No. 5, December 2002. [PDF]

4. Bozhong Li, “Farm Labour Productivity in Jiangnan, 1620–1850”, in Robert C. Allen, Tommy Bengtsson, and Martin Dribe, “Living standards in the past: new perspectives on well-being in Asia and Europe”, Oxford University, 2005. [PDF]

5. James Z. Lee and Cameron D. Campbell, “Living Standards in Liaoning, 1749–1909: Evidence from Demographic Outcomes”, in Robert C. Allen, Tommy Bengtsson, and Martin Dribe, “Living standards in the past: new perspectives on well-being in Asia and Europe”, Oxford University, 2005. [PDF]