Time: 2:30 PM – 3:30PM, Friday April 24

Venue: WDR 1003

Speaker: Wentian Diao, Assistant Professor of Economics at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Host: Peiyuan Li, Economic History and Development Research Lab researcher and Assistant Professor of  Political Economy, Duke Kunshan University

Abstract: When formal legal institutions improve, an important question is whether individuals adopt formal legal channels and how culture impacts the effectiveness of such reforms. This paper exploits the 2015 case-filing registration reform as a quasi-natural experiment and constructs a prefecture-level panel dataset by combining court judgments and clan genealogy records from 2014 to 2016. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we examine the impact of clan culture on judicial participation. The results show that greater clan cultural intensity significantly increases civil litigation following the reform. This effect is primarily driven by economic-related cases and disputes among strangers. We also find that clan culture promotes judicial participation by enhancing institutional trust and human capital, thereby improving individuals’ legal awareness and capacity to utilize the legal system.

Speaker’s bio: Wentian Diao is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. She received her Ph.D. from the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on the interaction between formal and informal institutions and their economic implications.