Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Collective Action in State and Society

在某些情况下，集体行动可能会引发革命，促使制度变革和新的国家形成。这个项目将调查两个集体行动的例子。集体行动联合委员会将首先调查集体行动历史能力的差异是否有助于解释具体土地改革运动的有效性。第二个项目探讨了劳工管理和劳工罢工的作用。这个项目着眼于一段时期内劳工罢工的发展，当时公司的管理方法和工会成员在不同的公司之间差别很大。激励性问题涉及外国管理的作用和资本采用在有组织的劳工罢工中的作用，以及工业化、全球化及其与有组织的劳工的互动的作用。这两个项目将引起广大受众的兴趣，吸取的经验教训可用于了解集体行动和集体组织是如何在不同的时间和地点产生并实现凝聚力的。这些项目还将从地方史的历史文献中创建新的数据集，这是关于文化和信仰体系的丰富信息来源，并使其他研究人员能够访问它们。在这项研究中，联合PI将收集关于近代经济史中集体行动的主要事件的历史数据，以更好地了解集体主义组织的作用及其历史决定因素。第一个项目将导致数百万中国内战(1945-1949)死亡记录的数字化，以及来自当地历史地方志的县级统计数据。这些数据将被用来评估(1)区域层面上土地再分配对农民的影响(2)机会成本、搭便车问题和胁迫等不同因素对土地改革的影响；(3)区域集体组织对土地改革和战争动员有效性的影响。这个项目通过考察土地改革如何在中国的内乱中发挥作用，为经济文献做出了贡献。在第二个项目中，联合PI将数字化19世纪劳工罢工的详细记录，当时的历史背景允许我们观察不同的外资和中国公司，共产主义和非共产主义工会的赞助，以及罢工结果。这些数据将被用来评估影响罢工成功概率的因素。该项目使用一个简单的框架，假设罢工最有可能在工人通过集体行动获得最大潜在收益的地方成功，利用丰富的历史数据来分析可能有助于解释雇主或雇员在公司或行业层面的讨价还价能力的因素。这一结果将有助于我们理解中国早期的劳工管理经验如何与全球历史相适应，到目前为止，全球历史几乎只关注欧洲和美国。这一奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Collective action can, in some cases, foment revolutions and precipitate institutional change and new state formations. This project will investigate two instances of collective action. The Co-PI will first investigate whether differences in the historical capacity for collective action helps to explain the effectiveness of a specific land reform campaign. The second project explores the role of labor management and labor strikes. This project looks at the development of labor strikes during a period when firm management methods and union membership varied widely from firm to firm. Motivating questions concern the role of foreign management and the role of capital adoption in organized labor strikes, as well as the roles of industrialization, globalization, and their interaction with organized labor. The two projects will be of interest to a wide audience, and the lessons learned could be used to understanding how collective action and collective organizations arise and achieve cohesion in different times and places. The projects will also create new datasets from the historical documentation of local histories, which is a rich source of information about cultures and belief systems, and make them accessible to other researchers.In this research, the co-PI will collect historical data on major episodes of collective action in recent economic history in order to obtain a better understanding of the role of collectivist organization and its historical determinants. The first project will result in the digitization of millions of death records from the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949) and statistics at the county level from local historical gazetteers. These data will be used to assess (1) the impact of land redistribution to farmers at a regional level (2) the influence of different factors, such as opportunity cost, free-rider problems, and coercion on land reform; (3) the impact of regional collective organization on the effectiveness of land reform and war mobilization. This project contributes to the economic literature by examining how land reform played a role in civil conflicts in China. In the second project, the co-PI will digitize detailed records of labor strikes in the 19th century when the historical context allows us to observe a diversity of foreign-owned and Chinese firms, communist versus non-communist union sponsorship, and strike outcomes. These data will be used to assess the factors that contributed to the probability of success in a strike. Using a simple framework that hypothesizes strikes are most likely to succeed where the workers have the largest potential gain over collective action, the project exploits the rich historical data to factors that may have contributed to the explanation of employers' or employees' bargaining power at the firm or industry level. The results will contribute to our understanding of how China’s early experience with labor management fits in with the global history that has so far tended to focus almost exclusively on Europe and the United States.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.