嘉    宾： 江   弦 助理教授，University of California, Davis

主持人： 段伊戈 助理教授, 上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院

时    间：2026年6月17日（周三）下午14:00-15:30

地    点: 上海交通大学徐汇校区安泰经济与管理学院A407

内容简介： States in historical and developing economies often use administrative simplification to facilitate monitoring and enforcement, distorting markets to make taxation tractable. We quantify the economic cost of such “state simplification” through China’s salt administration, a state monopoly that for over a millennium partitioned the empire into exclusive production and distribution districts with cross-district trade prohibited. Combining a new county-level panel of salt production from 960 to 1920 with boundary changes across five regimes, we show that shifts in administrative market access, rather than general market access, systematically shaped where salt was produced. To quantify the economic consequences, we estimate a spatial model in which a monopolist state chooses production sites subject to administrative trade barriers. Counterfactuals reveal substantial efficiency losses and misallocation of salt sites, providing a direct measure of the cost of limited fiscal capacity. We rationalize these findings with a model in which partitioning yields fiscal benefits but imposes economic costs, leading the state’s optimal district granularity to vary with its capacity.

演讲人简介：Xian Jiang is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. Her research studies how firms respond to technological change and government policies. She joined UC Davis in 2022 after receiving her Ph.D. from Duke University. She received her bachelor’s degree from Fudan University.