Assist. Prof. Yuan Zi

“A Thirst for Silver”

During her visit to CES, Yuan Zi will be presenting work on the historical and institutional roots of social instability in early nineteenth-century China. Her paper, “A Thirst for Silver,” examines how a global collapse in silver supply interacted with China’s rigid trade and taxation institutions to fuel widespread social unrest. Using newly assembled historical data and a reconstructed commercial network, the paper establishes that regions farther from Canton faced sharper silver price increases and higher conflict incidence, with silver-denominated taxation serving as the dominant transmission channel. Quantitative estimates from a spatial trade model indicate that the silver shock significantly reduced aggregate welfare, with the tax channel accounting for nearly all of the loss. Strikingly, trade liberalization alone would not have mitigated the crisis, whereas fiscal reform emerges as a far more effective policy response.

Yuan Zi’s research sits at the intersection of international trade, economic geography, and development economics, with particular attention to production networks, global value chains, and the interaction between trade and labor markets. More broadly, her research agenda explores how domestic and international institutional structures shape the real effects of global shocks, in both historical and contemporary policy debates. During her visit to CES, she will explore opportunities for collaborative research on industrial policy, with special emphasis on the institutional details of Chinese industrial policies and their unintended global consequences.

Yuan Zi is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, where she is also a Research Affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and a Research Associate at the University of Oslo. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Economic Geography and China Economic Review. Her work has been published in leading academic journals including the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of International Economics, and the International Economic Review.