Nanxiu Qian
Biographic Data
| ID | 698410 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nanxiu Qian |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nanxiu |
| FAMILY NAME | Qian |
| SIGNATURE | QIAN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | National Bureau of Economic Research |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-3326-1841 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 240 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Lore and Verse: Poems on History in Early Medieval China
Lore and Verse is the first English-language book dedicated entirely to studying the poetic subgenre of poems on history (yongshi shi 詠史詩). In this volume, Yue Zhang discusses how the poets in traditional China incorporated historical lore in their poems, using their literary productions as a means of negotiating and articulating the cultural pressures exerted upon them by history and the power of nostalgia. Zhang's research shows that these poet…
Immigrants and the Making of America
We study the effects of European immigration to the U.S. during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1920) on economic prosperity. Exploiting cross-county variation in immigration that arises from the interaction of fluctuations in aggregate immigrant flows and of the gradual expansion of the railway network, we find that counties with more historical immigration have higher income, less poverty, less unemployment, higher rates of urbanization, and gr…
On the road: Access to transportation infrastructure and economic growth in China
Choosing Racial Identity in the United States, 1880-1940
This paper documents that a large number of African American men experienced a change in racial identity to white during 1880 to 1940, while analogous changes were negligible for other races. We provide descriptive evidence that is consistent with the conventional wisdom that "passing" for white was a response to severe discrimination, and came at great personal cost. The findings suggest that contrary to traditional economic thinking, racial ide…
Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yu and Its Legacy
The Shih-shuo hsin-yu, conventionally translated as A New Account of Tales of the World, is one of the most significant works in the entire Chinese literary tradition. It established a genre (the Shih-shuo t'i ) and inspired dozens of imitations from the later part of the Tang dynasty (618-907) to the early Republican era of the twentieth century. The Shih-shuo hsin-yu consists of more than a thousand historical anecdotes about elite life in the …
Life Cycle Wage Growth across Countries
This paper documents how life cycle wage growth varies across countries. We harmonize repeated cross-sectional surveys from a set of countries of all income levels and then measure how wages rise with potential experience. Our main finding is that experience-wage profiles are on average twice as steep in rich countries as in poor countries. In addition, more educated workers have steeper profiles than the less educated; this accounts for around o…
Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui (1866-1911) and the Era of Reform
This book examines the late Qing reforms from the perspective of the talented and prolific woman writer Xue Shaohui and the reform-minded members of her social and intellectual networks. It moves attention from the well-known male historical actors of 1898 to the long-obscured women reformers and their male collaborators, and broadens the conventional focus on the “Hundred Days” to cover a much longer time period, from China’s Self-Strengthening …
Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform
In 1898, Qing dynasty emperor Guangxu ordered a series of reforms to correct the political, economic, cultural, and educational weaknesses exposed by China's defeat by Japan in the First Sino-Japanese War. The "Hundred Day's Reform" has received a great deal of attention from historians who have focused on the well-known male historical actors, but until now the Qing women reformers have received almost no consideration. In this book, historian N…
The Institutional Causes of China's Great Famine, 1959–1961
This article studies the causes of China's Great Famine, during which 16.5 to 45 million individuals perished in rural areas. We document that average rural food retention during the famine was too high to generate a severe famine without rural inequality in food availability; that there was significant variance in famine mortality rates across rural regions; and that rural mortality rates were positively correlated with per capita food productio…
Making Progress on Foreign Aid
Foreign aid is one of the most important policy tools that rich countries use to help poor countries improve population well-being and facilitate economic and institutional development. The empirical evidence on its benefits is mixed and has generated much controversy. This article presents descriptive statistics that show that foreign aid to very poor countries accounts for very little of total global aid; reviews the evidence that foreign aid i…
US Food Aid and Civil Conflict
We study the effect of US food aid on conflict in recipient countries. Our analysis exploits time variation in food aid shipments due to changes in US wheat production and cross-sectional variation in a country's tendency to receive any US food aid. According to our estimates, an increase in US food aid increases the incidence and duration of civil conflicts, but has no robust effect on interstate conflicts or the onset of civil conflicts. We als…
The Potato's Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence From A Historical Experiment
We exploit regional variation in suitability for cultivating potatoes, together with time variation arising from their introduction to the Old World from the Americas, to estimate the impact of potatoes on Old World population and urbanization.Our results show that the introduction of the potato was responsible for a significant portion of the increase in population and urbanization observed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Accordin…
The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas
This paper provides an overview of the long-term impacts of the Columbian Exchange-that is, the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops, technologies, populations, and cultures between the New World and the Old World after Christopher Columbus' voyage to the Americas in 1492. We focus on the aspects of the exchange that have been most neglected by economic studies; namely the transfer of diseases, food crops, and knowledge between the two Worlds.…
Income Inequality and Progressive Income Taxation in China and India, 1986–2015
This paper evaluates income tax reforms in China and India. The combination of fast income growth and under-indexed tax schedule in China implies the fraction of the Chinese population subject to income tax has increased from less than 0.1 percent in 1986 to about 20 percent in 2008, while it has stagnated around 2–3 percent in India. Chinese income tax revenues, as a share of GDP, increased from less than 0.1 percent in 1986 to about 1.5 percent…
Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China
Different Worlds of Discourse explores the late Qing reform era (c. 1895–1912) from three interrelated and comparatively neglected perspectives: the construction of gender roles, the development of literary genres, and the emergence of new forms of print media
Missing Women and the Price of Tea in China: The Effect of Sex-Specific Earnings on Sex Imbalance
Economists have long argued that the sex imbalance in developing countries is caused by underlying economic conditions. This paper uses exogenous increases in sex-specific agricultural income caused by post-Mao reforms in China to estimate the effects of total income and sex-specific income on sex-differential survival of children. Increasing female income, holding male income constant, improves survival rates for girls, whereas increasing male i…
Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China
Beyond Tradition and Modernity is a collection of original essays which considers the complexities behind the dramatic changes generated in China during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. As men and women literally-or metaphorically- crossed into new geographical worlds, they came to express their understanding of the expanding universe in a variety of ways which cannot be neatly labeled either trad…
"Borrowing Foreign Mirrors and Candles To Illuminate Chinese Civilization": Xue Shaohui's Moral Vision in The Biographies of Foreign Women
Waiguo lienü zhuan (Biographies of foreign women), the first systematic introduction of foreign women to the Chinese audience, was compiled by the late Qing writer Xue Shaohui (1866-1911) and her husband Chen Shoupeng (1857-?). This project represented an effort to advance the goals of the abortive 1898 reforms, a serious quest to incorporate Western experiences into the education of Chinese women. Through a close comparison with Western language…
Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yü and Its Legacy
The Shih-shuo hsin-yu, conventionally translated as A New Account of Tales of the World, is one of the most significant works in the entire Chinese literary tradition. It established a genre (the Shih-shuo t'i) and inspired dozens of imitations from the later part of the Tang dynasty (618-907) to the early Republican era of the twentieth century. The Shih-shuo hsin-yu consists of more than a thousand historical anecdotes about elite life in the l…
Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reforms
One particularly neglected facet of the generally neglected 1898 Reform Movement in China is the role of women. Chinese and Western scholars have tended to portray the campaign primarily as a male-led, Western-oriented enterprise in which Chinese women were largely silent and submissive, com-pliant rather than contentious. This article suggests, by contrast, that Chinese women participated in the 1890s reforms as active organizers and sophisticat…
Milk and Scent: Works About Women in the Shishuo Xlvyu Genre
"Milk and Scent" presents an interdisciplinary study of two Chinese works about women, both written after the genre of the famed Six Dynasties work, the Shishuo xinyu (A new account of tales of the world), and therefore entitled Nü Shishuo (Women's Shishuo). The two authors, one a man and the other a woman, both lived during the late imperial period and each endeavored to establish a female value system upon their disappointment with men and conv…
Daitō Seigo: An Alien Analogue of the Shih-shuo Hsin-yü
(1998). Daitō Seigo: An Alien Analogue of the Shih-shuo Hsin-yu. Early Medieval China: Vol. 1998, No. 1, pp. 49-82
The Potato's Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence From A Historical Experiment
We exploit regional variation in suitability for cultivating potatoes, together with time variation arising from their introduction to the Old World from the Americas, to estimate the impact of potatoes on Old World population and urbanization.Our results show that the introduction of the potato was responsible for a significant portion of the increase in population and urbanization observed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Accordin…
On the road: Access to transportation infrastructure and economic growth in China
The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas
This paper provides an overview of the long-term impacts of the Columbian Exchange-that is, the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops, technologies, populations, and cultures between the New World and the Old World after Christopher Columbus' voyage to the Americas in 1492. We focus on the aspects of the exchange that have been most neglected by economic studies; namely the transfer of diseases, food crops, and knowledge between the two Worlds.…
Life Cycle Wage Growth across Countries
This paper documents how life cycle wage growth varies across countries. We harmonize repeated cross-sectional surveys from a set of countries of all income levels and then measure how wages rise with potential experience. Our main finding is that experience-wage profiles are on average twice as steep in rich countries as in poor countries. In addition, more educated workers have steeper profiles than the less educated; this accounts for around o…
Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reforms
One particularly neglected facet of the generally neglected 1898 Reform Movement in China is the role of women. Chinese and Western scholars have tended to portray the campaign primarily as a male-led, Western-oriented enterprise in which Chinese women were largely silent and submissive, com-pliant rather than contentious. This article suggests, by contrast, that Chinese women participated in the 1890s reforms as active organizers and sophisticat…
Daitō Seigo: An Alien Analogue of the Shih-shuo Hsin-yü
(1998). Daitō Seigo: An Alien Analogue of the Shih-shuo Hsin-yu. Early Medieval China: Vol. 1998, No. 1, pp. 49-82
Milk and Scent: Works About Women in the Shishuo Xlvyu Genre
"Milk and Scent" presents an interdisciplinary study of two Chinese works about women, both written after the genre of the famed Six Dynasties work, the Shishuo xinyu (A new account of tales of the world), and therefore entitled Nü Shishuo (Women's Shishuo). The two authors, one a man and the other a woman, both lived during the late imperial period and each endeavored to establish a female value system upon their disappointment with men and conv…
Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yü and Its Legacy
The Shih-shuo hsin-yu, conventionally translated as A New Account of Tales of the World, is one of the most significant works in the entire Chinese literary tradition. It established a genre (the Shih-shuo t'i) and inspired dozens of imitations from the later part of the Tang dynasty (618-907) to the early Republican era of the twentieth century. The Shih-shuo hsin-yu consists of more than a thousand historical anecdotes about elite life in the l…
Revitalizing the Xianyuan (Worthy Ladies) Tradition: Women in the 1898 Reforms
One particularly neglected facet of the generally neglected 1898 Reform Movement in China is the role of women. Chinese and Western scholars have tended to portray the campaign primarily as a male-led, Western-oriented enterprise in which Chinese women were largely silent and submissive, com-pliant rather than contentious. This article suggests, by contrast, that Chinese women participated in the 1890s reforms as active organizers and sophisticat…
Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre, and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China
Beyond Tradition and Modernity is a collection of original essays which considers the complexities behind the dramatic changes generated in China during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. As men and women literally-or metaphorically- crossed into new geographical worlds, they came to express their understanding of the expanding universe in a variety of ways which cannot be neatly labeled either trad…
"Borrowing Foreign Mirrors and Candles To Illuminate Chinese Civilization": Xue Shaohui's Moral Vision in The Biographies of Foreign Women
Waiguo lienü zhuan (Biographies of foreign women), the first systematic introduction of foreign women to the Chinese audience, was compiled by the late Qing writer Xue Shaohui (1866-1911) and her husband Chen Shoupeng (1857-?). This project represented an effort to advance the goals of the abortive 1898 reforms, a serious quest to incorporate Western experiences into the education of Chinese women. Through a close comparison with Western language…
Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China
Different Worlds of Discourse explores the late Qing reform era (c. 1895–1912) from three interrelated and comparatively neglected perspectives: the construction of gender roles, the development of literary genres, and the emergence of new forms of print media
Missing Women and the Price of Tea in China: The Effect of Sex-Specific Earnings on Sex Imbalance
Economists have long argued that the sex imbalance in developing countries is caused by underlying economic conditions. This paper uses exogenous increases in sex-specific agricultural income caused by post-Mao reforms in China to estimate the effects of total income and sex-specific income on sex-differential survival of children. Increasing female income, holding male income constant, improves survival rates for girls, whereas increasing male i…
Income Inequality and Progressive Income Taxation in China and India, 1986–2015
This paper evaluates income tax reforms in China and India. The combination of fast income growth and under-indexed tax schedule in China implies the fraction of the Chinese population subject to income tax has increased from less than 0.1 percent in 1986 to about 20 percent in 2008, while it has stagnated around 2–3 percent in India. Chinese income tax revenues, as a share of GDP, increased from less than 0.1 percent in 1986 to about 1.5 percent…
The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas
This paper provides an overview of the long-term impacts of the Columbian Exchange-that is, the exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops, technologies, populations, and cultures between the New World and the Old World after Christopher Columbus' voyage to the Americas in 1492. We focus on the aspects of the exchange that have been most neglected by economic studies; namely the transfer of diseases, food crops, and knowledge between the two Worlds.…
The Potato's Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence From A Historical Experiment
We exploit regional variation in suitability for cultivating potatoes, together with time variation arising from their introduction to the Old World from the Americas, to estimate the impact of potatoes on Old World population and urbanization.Our results show that the introduction of the potato was responsible for a significant portion of the increase in population and urbanization observed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Accordin…
US Food Aid and Civil Conflict
We study the effect of US food aid on conflict in recipient countries. Our analysis exploits time variation in food aid shipments due to changes in US wheat production and cross-sectional variation in a country's tendency to receive any US food aid. According to our estimates, an increase in US food aid increases the incidence and duration of civil conflicts, but has no robust effect on interstate conflicts or the onset of civil conflicts. We als…
Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui (1866-1911) and the Era of Reform
This book examines the late Qing reforms from the perspective of the talented and prolific woman writer Xue Shaohui and the reform-minded members of her social and intellectual networks. It moves attention from the well-known male historical actors of 1898 to the long-obscured women reformers and their male collaborators, and broadens the conventional focus on the “Hundred Days” to cover a much longer time period, from China’s Self-Strengthening …
Politics, Poetics, and Gender in Late Qing China: Xue Shaohui and the Era of Reform
In 1898, Qing dynasty emperor Guangxu ordered a series of reforms to correct the political, economic, cultural, and educational weaknesses exposed by China's defeat by Japan in the First Sino-Japanese War. The "Hundred Day's Reform" has received a great deal of attention from historians who have focused on the well-known male historical actors, but until now the Qing women reformers have received almost no consideration. In this book, historian N…
The Institutional Causes of China's Great Famine, 1959–1961
This article studies the causes of China's Great Famine, during which 16.5 to 45 million individuals perished in rural areas. We document that average rural food retention during the famine was too high to generate a severe famine without rural inequality in food availability; that there was significant variance in famine mortality rates across rural regions; and that rural mortality rates were positively correlated with per capita food productio…
Making Progress on Foreign Aid
Foreign aid is one of the most important policy tools that rich countries use to help poor countries improve population well-being and facilitate economic and institutional development. The empirical evidence on its benefits is mixed and has generated much controversy. This article presents descriptive statistics that show that foreign aid to very poor countries accounts for very little of total global aid; reviews the evidence that foreign aid i…
Spirit and Self in Medieval China: The Shih-shuo hsin-yu and Its Legacy
The Shih-shuo hsin-yu, conventionally translated as A New Account of Tales of the World, is one of the most significant works in the entire Chinese literary tradition. It established a genre (the Shih-shuo t'i ) and inspired dozens of imitations from the later part of the Tang dynasty (618-907) to the early Republican era of the twentieth century. The Shih-shuo hsin-yu consists of more than a thousand historical anecdotes about elite life in the …
Life Cycle Wage Growth across Countries
This paper documents how life cycle wage growth varies across countries. We harmonize repeated cross-sectional surveys from a set of countries of all income levels and then measure how wages rise with potential experience. Our main finding is that experience-wage profiles are on average twice as steep in rich countries as in poor countries. In addition, more educated workers have steeper profiles than the less educated; this accounts for around o…
Choosing Racial Identity in the United States, 1880-1940
This paper documents that a large number of African American men experienced a change in racial identity to white during 1880 to 1940, while analogous changes were negligible for other races. We provide descriptive evidence that is consistent with the conventional wisdom that "passing" for white was a response to severe discrimination, and came at great personal cost. The findings suggest that contrary to traditional economic thinking, racial ide…
Immigrants and the Making of America
We study the effects of European immigration to the U.S. during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1920) on economic prosperity. Exploiting cross-county variation in immigration that arises from the interaction of fluctuations in aggregate immigrant flows and of the gradual expansion of the railway network, we find that counties with more historical immigration have higher income, less poverty, less unemployment, higher rates of urbanization, and gr…
On the road: Access to transportation infrastructure and economic growth in China
Lore and Verse: Poems on History in Early Medieval China
Lore and Verse is the first English-language book dedicated entirely to studying the poetic subgenre of poems on history (yongshi shi 詠史詩). In this volume, Yue Zhang discusses how the poets in traditional China incorporated historical lore in their poems, using their literary productions as a means of negotiating and articulating the cultural pressures exerted upon them by history and the power of nostalgia. Zhang's research shows that these poet…
China (14 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (12 works) · History (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Economics (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Literature (7 works) · Archaeology (6 works)