The RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series brings leading researchers to Berlin to share their latest work and engage with our community. We are pleased to welcome Wolfgang Keller (University of Colorado) for this session, where he will share his work.
Wolfgang Keller is Professor at University Of Colorado Boulder and Director of the McGuire Center for International Economics. His research spans international trade, innovation and growth, and the economics of gender, with a particular focus on developments in economic history as well as international trade and regional economics. He is member of both NBER and CEPR, and his research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, as well as other journals.
Event Topic:
Elite Strategies for Big Shocks: The Case of the Fall of the Ming
with Carol H. Shiue
This paper documents persistence in the power of elite families in Central China despite dynastic change. We study the impact of the fall of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) on couples and their descendants (treatment of people), and present evidence on the response of multigenerational family lines to a big shock. Local Ming elites suffered a decline in influence in the short run, but in the long-run their descendants recovered and tightened their grip on power in their role as the elites of the new Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). In contrast to the recovery of family lines, the fall of Ming had a more persistently negative impact on the regions that historically were most strongly negatively affected by the shock (treatment of regions). The paper suggests that the elite reversal is due to trauma caused by Ming destruction that shifted norms towards the most socially respectable career paths based on the civil service exam; these norms were, to a greater degree, intergenerationally transmitted in family lines that suffered more from the destruction in the fall of the Ming dynasty.
Event Details:
Date: 24 June 2025
Time: 14:00–15:15
Participation: the seminar is open to the public and targeted to an academic audience.
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