Curriculum Control and Innovation (Job Market Paper)

Abstract: This article empirically explores the effect of curriculum control in education on cross-country innovative capacity. I argue that more centralized curriculum control, which combines more centralized official curriculum design with high-stakes achievement exams, would lead to more homogeneous learning experiences and bring other side effects to students (e.g., impair imagination, curiosity, critical thinking, and self-confidence of students). It is less favorable for cultivating their creativity, and it weakens the national creativeness. The regression results are quite robust and show that curriculum control is negatively associated with the national innovativeness captured by various and different dimensions of innovation indicators. Using the exogenous variation in the deviation of land productivity (measured by the standard deviation of the Caloric Suitability Index) and the number of native cultures before colonization as instrumental variables, I identify the causal and negative effects of curriculum control on innovation. This study implies that the recent education reforms in some developed countries that aim to improve students’ test performances by implementing more centralized and standardized curriculum and high-stakes exams would undermine their innovative capacities in the long run.

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Is Democracy Good for Growth? -- Institutional Quality Matters (with Fali Huang)

Abstract: The level of economic development during democratization exerts long-lasting effects on growth, possibly by giving permanent birthmarks to newly minted institutions. This paper finds that democracies born in weak development tend to have weak institutions and slow growth, while in contrast, those with adequate development at the political transition time establish strong institutions and achieve faster growth. Salient differences between them also exist in other dimensions such as population growth rates and populism tendencies. These results are based on data in 1960-2010 and robust to various specifications and endogeneity issues. The paper shows that without appropriate development, democratization does not facilitate growth.

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• Presented at the 5th International Workshop on Economic Analysis of Institutions at Xiamen University, the 2017 Conference of the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics (SIOE) at Columbia University, the 2017 Annual Australasian Public Choice Conference (APCC) at Deakin University, the 2018 China Meeting of the Econometric Society at Fudan University, and the 2018 International Conference on Economic Theory and Applications at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics
   

 

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Economic Growth and Democratization —The Legacy of State History

Abstract: This paper studies the heterogeneous effects of democracy and the strength of state on economic growth as well as the role of the strength of the state on democratization. I establish a unified political-economy model to analyze the process of economic growth and democratization in the context of different state capacities and their distinct educational policies. Autocracy with a powerful state has the advantage of providing specific education that improves the productivity of the masses in using mature technologies, while democracy has the advantage of offering general education that enhances the productivity of the masses in using advanced technology as well as providing skills that allow the masses to defend their own interests in cases of political conflict. Thus, autocracy with a developed state outperforms democracy in economic growth at the early stage of development, while democracy performs better when general human capital is the main engine of growth. To ensure sustainable economic growth, democratization is needed when an autocratic country becomes rich, but the well-developed state that once brought economic prosperity may become a stumbling block to political reform, as the ruling elites can easily suppress their opponents. I empirically confirm that democracy has greater effects on growth when the country has a more educated population, while the effect of the strength of state on growth is stronger when the country has a fewer educated population. Additionally, I find an inverted U-shaped link between the strength of the state and democratization.

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