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Jinshi quota kinks
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Claim (verbatim)
Jinshi quota kinks. Joins the bunching estimators of modern public finance — the kink analysis that detects tax brackets as piles of taxpayers stacked exactly at the threshold — to the Chinese examination system. If jinshi degrees simply tracked the geography of talent and schooling, per-prefecture pass counts would vary smoothly; but Song and Ming governments imposed regional pass quotas, and a binding quota acts exactly like a tax kink, truncating the distribution and leaving tell-tale excess mass at the quota value. The claim is that these administrative ceilings, not the geography of talent, shaped the spatial distribution of the empire's elite. It predicts clear bunching of prefectural pass counts at the quota values under the quota regimes, and a marked weakening of the correlation between a prefecture's degree counts and its registered population once quotas bind, compared with the early Northern Song open-competition regime.
Prediction clause (verbatim)
In per-exam, per-prefecture jinshi counts under quota regimes (Southern Song regional quotas; Ming north-south-central ratios after 1425), counts bunch at the quota value with a bunching ratio >=2 against a smooth counterfactual fitted from non-binding prefectures; and the cross-prefecture correlation of degree counts with registered population falls below 0.4 in quota periods versus above 0.6 in the early Northern Song open regime.
Kill-dataset (verbatim)
Kill: China Biographical Database (CBDB) jinshi lists with prefecture attributions plus published quota schedules. No excess mass at quota values, or an unchanged population correlation across regimes, kills it.
Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior scholarship. Kills and prior scholarship are credited here, by name, as they come in.
On Inferpedia
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Provenance
Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5
Generated by a fresh Fable-tier instance at maximum effort with generation-first blindness (no repo reads, no searches, no DB queries); title list supplied at launch, titles only, no verdicts or dossiers seen; prompt pre-committed in docs/GOAL_CONJECTURES_BATCH2_20260705.md (7e55eb8). Novelty unverified by construction.
Novelty / leakage triage
anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run
Quota politics and regional jinshi distribution are actively studied econometrically (Political Economy of the Quota; Long Live Keju; the 2025 Ming tri-regional equity study) and the bunching estimator is standard public finance (Saez), but applying bunching-at-the-quota against a smooth counterfactual to per-prefecture jinshi counts was not located.
- 'The Political Economy of the Quota in Chinese Imperial Examination' — Quota econometrics on the same data
- Saez 2010, 'Do Taxpayers Bunch at Kink Points?' — The borrowed estimator
Predictions
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