Job Market Paper
The Unintended Consequences of Removing Trade
Distortions: Social Conflict in Qing China
Zixin Wang· Latest draft: [Oct 2026]
Abstract
Policy reforms can redistribute economic opportunities, undermining livelihoods
in some places while creating them in others. I ask whether such losses and gains affect
rebellion. For nearly a century before 1842, Qing China confined Western trade to Canton,
so export tea and silk traveled to that port along inland routes that employed many porters
and boatmen. The 1842 Treaty of Nanjing opened new northern ports, and the traffic moved
to shorter routes. Using a newly constructed county-year panel of rebellion events from
Qing imperial archives, covering 427 counties between 1820 and 1860, I find that the annual
probability of rebellion increased by 9.6 percentage points in counties along the old routes
relative to other counties within the same provinces, equivalent to approximately 68 percent
of the sample mean. In contrast, counties along the newly favored routes experienced a
relative decline of 5.4 percentage points. Counties on the old routes were also more vulnerable
to the Taiping Rebellion (1851 to 1864), one of the deadliest civil wars in history. Reforms
that improve the allocation of economic activity can thus have unequal consequences for
local political stability
Selection or Shaping? Cohort Effects, Experience, and Politician’s Support for Military Intervention
with Giorgio Ravalli and Peter Ward-Griffin · Working paper
Abstract
This paper examines how exposure to war shapes politicians' attitudes toward military intervention, defense spending, and veteran's benefits. We distinguish between two mechanisms:
selection, whereby wartime exposure influences who enters politics and wins elections, and shaping, whereby personal and cohort-level war experiences alter politicians' policy preferences. We further investigate
whether these effects vary with public perceptions of the war. By disentangling selection from preference formation, the paper seeks to clarify how historical conflicts influence political presentation and subsequent policy decisions.
Operational AI Embedding and Green Innovation: When Rapid Adaptation Matters
with Wei Zhao, Mahak Sharma, and Hao Chen · Working paper
Abstract
Firms increasingly report using artificial intelligence (AI), but disclosure alone does not reveal whether AI is embedded in the workflows where operating decisions are monitored, coordinated, and revised. We introduce disclosed AI-enabled execution capability (AEC), a sentence-level construct that treats annual-report text as evidence of workflow embedding only when AI language is tied to concrete execution features and operational or governance processes. Using a large panel of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2020 to 2025, we examine the link between AEC and subsequent green invention patenting. Once firm fixed effects, prior innovation, and adjacent digital measures are accounted for, the average within-firm association is small, but it is markedly stronger when operating conditions require rapid adaptation. The same pattern holds under alternative timing restrictions, non-text task proxies, and an external measure of environmental-enforcement pressure. The design is observational: disclosed AEC is measured from corporate reports and does not verify system use.
