12.8 Lab: Study

  • The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa (Nunn and Wantchekon 2011a)
    • “current differences in trust levels within Africa can be traced back to the trans-Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. Combining contemporary individual-level survey data with historic data on slave shipments by ethnic group, we find that individuals whose ancestors were heavily raided during the slave trade are less trusting today”
    • Instrument: “instrument that is correlated with the number of slaves taken from an ethnic group but uncorrelated with any characteristics of the ethnic group that may affect the trust of descendants […] distance of an individual’s ethnic group from the coast during the slave trade […] instrument captures an ethnic group’s exposure to the external demand for slaves, since slaves were purchased at the coast before being shipped overseas. Further, distance from the coast is plausibly uncorrelated with other factors that affected the trust of their descendants.” (Nunn and Wantchekon 2011a, 3239)
    • Narrow and Scientific Replication of ‘the Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa’ Deconinck and Verpoorten (2013)
  • Treatment: Slave Trade (1400-1900)
  • Outcome: Present-day levels of Trust (2005)
    • Q: In how far may a large time period between cause and outcome be problematic?
  • Instrument: Ethnic group’s distance from the coast

References

Deconinck, Koen, and Marijke Verpoorten. 2013. “Narrow and Scientific Replication of ’the Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa’.” J. Appl. Econ. 28 (1): 166–69.

Nunn, Nathan, and Leonard Wantchekon. 2011a. “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa.” Am. Econ. Rev. 101 (7): 3221–52.