 What drives gender inequality is that just pure discrimination or it also has some roots in the productivity differences. And what I find is that you actually have both, right? So this discrimination, it definitely has grown in those later outcomes when there is no more productivity differences between men and women. But the origin of this discrimination does also go back to the initial productivity differences. I am an assistant professor at London School of Economics. So before I have also worked at Northwestern University in UCLA and I spent a little bit of time at Brown University. So I have been mostly an economic historian. I've done work mostly on China. But then I think within this niche I've really developed an interest also in gender. So some of my work has been trying to further pursue both of these directions. The research on culture and institutions has received a lot of interest in economic growth especially. I mean the reason for this is because as time goes on economists really realize that our current explanations for economic growth is rather inadequate. So even after you take into account all those factors in capital, labor, human capital, there is still a lot left to be explained. Just as a quick intuition, I think this is actually the old idea that we think culture varies across societies and somehow it might have been predictive of some of the important outcomes. But this idea has only been more rigorously examined both in the Seratic Horn and Perical Ways in the past 10 or 20 years. So there's many reasons for this. Part of this is because there has been more data available. But partly this is because some of our pioneer thinkers are people like Avnagrave on the Seri side but like Nazan down on the more Rain-Perco side. So that is combined all these forces and it has been a huge wave of interest and a growing literature on those topics. So when economists think about culture we look at the most recent 10 years of literature. It's mostly about values, beliefs and customs. I think I would say the values and beliefs are even more important because those are things that shape how you think and then how you make decisions. And usually it's been implied in a way that is non-standard or deviate from rationality which is some assumptions that traditionally economists would be adhering to. So that component of the belief system has attracted a lot of interest. What people have been doing is trying to study. So A, it's origins, where it comes from and then it's impact. And sometimes we're also trying to trace the evolution of those values and beliefs. And then as you can see there is a very nice intersection between this type of work, culture, economics and economic history because economic history gives you all these tools and access to the archives and those are all ways to make this study as more regressive and more based and grounded in facts. So yeah, I think there has been a lot of challenges of course because as you said those are concepts themselves are pretty hard to measure. Different people have different ways to think about it. But I think as we have tried in the second consensus building process over time and there has been a lot of achievements work but also just solving those methodological challenges as we go I think it is still very promising literature there is like a lot to be hopeful in the future. So the basic story, so what happened is in China you have traditionally just household very basic economic model you have like men and women specializing in different tasks and they both had to pay those in-kind taxes to the state. So that is the background and then around 1300 there has been a technological shock and this benefited woman in this very unique way. And then I exploit this shock and then trying to measure its impact over time. So a lot of what's work is trying to first to identify all those conditions near the shock so then I can have some idea about how this technological shock affected this economy and in which ways it affected women's position in the absence of other complications and then I trace it over time so initially the paper is rather simple it's just like look at the very end and look at the 2000 census and the effects of this current revolution and sex, racial and balances and then as I think about it more and I realize that it's also important to be able to document all those changes in between and then the paper started incorporating more elements and it has effects and outcomes in 1600s where I looked at how it affects widow survival and then it's also in the 19th century and the time period in between some of this goes into the bright prices versus the dowry so I find that the current revolution makes it more likely that the men will be paying no men's family will be paying a bright price to the women's family which is also consistent and broadly speaking with this view that in the current revolution by increasing women's income then also increase their bargaining power in the marriage markets and then some of the other findings include especially after we had no current revolution the economic effects anymore how does that affect or does it affect being retained or not so what I find is that in the relatively free free economy context free market context you see this current revolution the after effects of this current revolution continue to increase women's labor force participation which means they are more likely to be in the labor force and not just in the current textiles or current textile sector but in all sectors across the board and then also even in the more stringent conditions which is the state socialism era you can assume most of these decisions are not being taken away from the private individuals which also means their beliefs and values the other economic effects would have very little impact on all these outcomes we care about but even so that we still find the current revolution has the effect on how likely women become the head of the household one of the pieces of evidence that is super convincing it does seem to be the case that the current revolution has managed to transform the beliefs about women and how competent or able they are relative to men so the areas with the current revolution are more likely to hold this more egalitarian view towards women and more likely to think they are just as capable as their male counterparts of their study so the reason I think I like the project a lot is I do think that it is one of these cases that a comic history is showing so much promise and able to answer important questions in both labor economics and development economics in the sense that it answers this age old question about what drives gender inequality is that just pure discrimination or it also has some roots in the productivity differences and what I find is that you actually have both so this discrimination definitely has grown in this later outcomes when there is no more productivity differences between men and women but the origin of this discrimination does also go back to the initial productivity differences so I think this is just echo some of the points raised in Cheryl Longberg's recent work also in a similar vein about how we think about gender inequality in labor economics but in development economics is you know that there is a lot of efforts trying to understand the effects of having those cash transfers to women and how does that affect both positions at home but also in society and the historical shock that the China went through has a very good chance to inform the larger broader profession about some of the most important questions that we care about the literary acquisition in China so it is a phenomenon that happened mostly during the Qing period which is about 1600 to 1800 so during this period we know this historical background of the Chinese-Chinese population subject to the new control or the new ruling of the Manchus who also is a different group and then I think the tool they exploited at this time in order to solidify their power which was to really trying to keep the Hainan elites or the traditional literati under control normally I think of this as a pretty quiet group as it is they don't really have any independent political power but one thing they could do is to have a discussion about all those issues which is indeed something happened a lot just before the Qing came along and this creates this space of intervention for the states which is they can just actively impose these rules about what should not be in the discussion at all and then some of the methods they employed is to make sure that any of these cases where any of the suspect speech will have to be reported and this resulted in a very long time period of most of the people being extremely careful about what they say in public to people who they do not know so I think that is why there is a pretty persistent and long-term effects that I observe in the data so what I do is then taking those snapshots of different time periods and using various different ways to proxy this latent variable which is the beliefs towards the strangers and the ability to co-operate among the ordinary people and the elites themselves and then what I find is in places where they witnessed this literally inquisition which is literally just having speech crimes and having illicit speech and being punished and much more likely to they are much less likely to be able to organize the local charities and later on I also look at their ability to provide local public goods so the variable I look at is the schooling provisions so they are less likely to be able to provide schools and then these effects after you continuously document these effects which exist throughout this period then eventually at the modern time what I find is that the literally inquisition also reduces the interest in political participation this is even true for the very local level participation how likely it would be on the board of some community engagement how likely people would be thinking their influence on this policymaking is anywhere close to being meaningful so yeah so this is just a trying to piece together different facts and the data from like very different time periods in different parts of the country and to put together this picture of the long-term effects of the literally inquisitions and to me I think the study is mostly trying to so when I started this again this is also a project I started in grad school I think it's coming from I think perceived for the literary class which has a lot of good things about it but again it's also a group that has suffered a lot of trauma for various reasons both in imperial times and more recently but then the more I work on it I also realize this is where you see this dynamics between the state and the civil society which actually plays out in the long run and as the state predates on the civil society and the civil society gets weakened then that is how eventually the autocracy becomes more entrenched so some of this I think it's yeah economic history again has this potential to inform some of the higher level questions that social scientists has just been very interested in for various reasons and also just like for more modern you know from the Trump time to the more recent all these discussions about the states and autocracies I've often find those ancient seemingly ancient and the removed events continue to be very and providing useful insights and to shape our thinking of the more recent events