History and Development

The History and Development program uses historical records, modern empirical methods, and computational tools to understand long-run economic change and development. By linking past and present, the program examines how institutions, infrastructure, technology, families, and historical legacies shape growth, inequality, and policy outcomes today.

 

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Highlights

  • Long-run growth, economic development, governance, and institutional change

  • Historical family, household, village, and regional datasets across Asia and beyond 

  • Social mobility, cultural transmission, infrastructure, technology, and state capacity 

  • NLP, OCR, machine learning, archival computation, and large-scale longitudinal data construction 

Research Members

Carol H. SHIUE (Program leader, Visiting Professor, ECON)

Sangyoon PARK (Associate Professor, SOSC)

Rui TANG (Associate Professor, ECON)

Yu-Hsiang LEI (Assistant Professor, SOSC)

Jinlin WEI (Assistant Professor, SOSC)

Wolfgang KELLER (Visiting Professor, ECON)

 

Research Highlights

Research Outputs

Mining Chinese Historical Sources at Scale: A Machine-Learning Approach to Qing State Capacity

Carol H. Shiue with Wolfgang Keller and Yan Sen

Technology Training, Buyer-Supplier Relationship, and Quality Upgrading in an Agricultural Supply Chain

Sangyoon Park, Zhaoneng Yuan, and Hongsong Zhang

Path Dependency in Physician Decisions

Lawrence Jin, Rui Tang, Han Ye, Junjian Yi, and Songfa Zhong

Safe spaces for children: School sanitation and sexual violence

Gao, Pei, Aditi Kothari, and Yu-Hsiang Lei

Railways and cities in India

Fenske, J., Kala, N., & Wei, J.

People versus Places: Elite Persistence After the Fall of the Ming

Wolfgang Keller

Grants & Recognition

Sangyoon PARK

Elite Migration and Economic Development: Evidence from Divided Korea, 2026-2028
General Research Fund (GRF), Hong Kong Research Grants Council

Yu-Hsiang LEI

Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 2, 2023-2025

Jinlin WEI

After Bretton Woods: The Rise of Hong Kong as a Financial Centre, 2027-2029
Early Career Scheme (ECS), Hong Kong Research Grants Council