Jinshi quota kinks

Status: Prior

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Jinshi quota kinks. Joins public-finance bunching estimators (the kink analysis used on modern tax records) to the Chinese examination system: regional pass quotas, not the geography of talent, shaped the spatial distribution of the empire's elite, and quotas leave the same tell-tale excess mass at the kink that tax brackets leave in earnings data.

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.

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

Adjacent (closely related prior work exists)

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

No prediction registered yet.

Weigh in

No community feedback yet.

Add your take

Posted immediately (spam is removed). Community feedback is never an adjudicated verdict and never changes this conjecture's triage label or status above.