Zhao Dong — Economics

About

I am a job-market candidate in Economics (Ph.D. expected July 1, 2026). My work sits at the intersection of economic history and political economy, examining the long-run relationship between political institutions, elite recruitment, and economic performance in imperial China within a broader Eurasian comparison. I combine three components: new GDP-per-head series from 2 CE to 1328 CE, a 55-dynasty panel on elite backgrounds that tracks shifts between patrimonial and meritocratic rule, and micro evidence on kinship privilege from more than 40,000 Qing imperial clan members. Across these settings, I show that external shocks—especially foreign conquest—tilt appointments toward imperial kin, entrenching patrimonialism, eroding bureaucratic capacity, and constraining sustained growth. This framework reframes early prosperity and subsequent stagnation in China and speaks to debates on the Great Divergence and the institutional foundations of long-run development.

Research

Job Market Paper

Shocks, Elites, and State Capacity: Evidence from Information‑Rich Administration JMP

Abstract: External shocks causally shift appointments toward loyalty; high information capacity dampens and shortens this shift; patrimonial drift is associated with lower tax efficiency, attenuated by information capacity.

Paper (PDF) Slides Appendix

Working Papers

Information Capacity as a Fiscal Stabilizer — IV using shock‑induced variation in elite composition. PDF
Coalition Reallocation Across Dynasties — Cross‑dynasty Top‑Tier validation (50+ regimes). PDF

Work in Progress

Text‑as‑Data measures from decrees and memorials; administrative replication with modern data.

Teaching

Introductory Economics (UG): Micro & macro foundations; supply–demand; welfare & market failures; growth & inflation; policy trade-offs; historical case studies.
Core Macroeconomics (UG): Long-run growth (Solow & structural change), business cycles & measurement, monetary/fiscal policy, open-economy macro; applications with historical national accounts.
Quantitative Economics (UG): Data wrangling in R/Python, reproducible workflows & version control; causal tools (DiD/event-study, IV, RD) and time-series basics; replication with historical datasets.

CV

Download CV (PDF)

Data & Code

Patrimonialism Index (annual) — repo / data
Information Capacity Index — repo

Contact

Department of Economics, University of Oxford
Email: zhao.dong@economics.ox.ac.uk