Time: 10:30 am to 12:00 pm, April 19

Venue: IB 1011

Speaker: Mark Hup, Assistant Professor at School of Economics at Peking University

Host: Peiyuan Li, Assistant Professor of Political Economy at Duke Kunshan University

Speaker’s bio: Mark Hup is an Assistant Professor at Peking University’s School of Economics. His research focuses on the impacts of trade shocks and state capacity on fiscal modernization, a key aspect of long-run development. He got his PhD in Economics from UC Davis in 2021.

Abstract: * What determines the use of labor coercion? This paper studies the impact of trade on corvée labor – the payment of taxation in labor – in colonial Indonesia. To do so, I construct a unique database on corvée usage and exports at the residency-product-year level from 1900 to 1940. The results show that trade booms, especially of labor-intensive exports, reduced corvée usage. The effect ran through laborers buying themselves out of corvée. The buy-out option enabled high-productivity laborers to self-select out of corvée without requiring stronger information-collection capabilities of the state. Through such buyouts, the fall in in-kind taxation was mirrored by a rise in monetary taxation. The opposite took place during the trade collapse of the Great Depression. While some studies find a positive relationship between trade and private labor coercion, I argue public labor coercion follows a different logic due to the state’s encompassing interest. The nature of the relationship between coercer and coerced is thus key in understanding labor coercion.