Cliometrica最新文献

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-021-00233-6

If historical shocks influence educational outcomes, how long does the effect last, and does it differ among ethnic groups? This study answers these questions by exploiting the historical experiment of partition—that is the splitting of the British Raj into India and Pakistan—and by presenting a theoretical model that explains the trade-offs such a shock uncovers for different ethnic groups that have to decide between assimilation through education and maintaining their ethnic specificity. We use different rounds of Pakistan social and living standard measurement (PSLM) survey and analyze the educational outcomes of the grandchildren of partition (i.e., whose grandparents were born during the partition). We show that the scar from partition is long-lasting, as the present generation is still living under its influence. More importantly, our results reveal the different adaptation strategies of ethnic and cultural groups in the long run.

The abnormally high sex ratio at birth (SRB) is a demographic outcome that appears in several countries in Asia and Africa and results from sex-based discrimination. Whether or not neonatal discrimination was a widespread response to socioeconomic demands during the demographic transition in Europe remains an open question. To address this concern, this paper exploits the exogenous increase in the cost of child rearing caused by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Using random discontinuity techniques, a sharp and statistically significant increase in SRB appears with the war. This finding provides an opportunity to examine a challenging concern: whether neonatal discrimination fosters or reduces the discrimination suffered by girls in childhood. To examine the multiplier effects of discrimination, the paper investigates the potential role that women’s bargaining power could play in preventing the functioning of the transmission mechanism. To that end, the paper exploits historical geographical differences in women’s bargaining power that were inherent to the predominant kinship system in Spanish provinces (stem vs. nuclear). The results show that an increase of one standard deviation in the interaction term between gender and SRB led, on average, to a 9% points increase in under-five mortality in nuclear provinces. However, this positive relationship is not found in stem provinces, where women had greater bargaining power. The paper points out that policies aimed at creating a more egalitarian legal framework may fail if they are not accompanied by actions aimed at affecting beliefs and preferences for equality in society.

The abundance of domesticable mammals in Eurasia facilitated its early transition from hunter–gatherer to agricultural economies, with dramatic consequences for human history. This paper empirically examines the origins of these biogeographical advantages and finds that the extinction of large mammals during the past 100,000 years was a decisive force in the evolution of mammal domestication. In Eurasia’s domestication cradles, humans had sufficient incentives to continually practice herd management as a hunting strategy to prevent the depletion of their vital common resources. These strategies changed some targeted species and made them more receptive to human domination. The absence of these conditions (human incentive and animal receptivity) in other regions resulted in the paucity of domestication. The paper presents the most comprehensive empirical analysis of the origins of animal domestication and the roots of global inequalities to date and unearths a critical channel for the influence of deep history on comparative economic development.

This paper adds to a growing literature that charts and explains inequality levels in pre-industrial societies. On the basis of a wide variety of primary documents, the degree of inequality is estimated for 32 different residencies, the largest administrative units and comparable to present-day provinces, of late colonial Indonesia. Four different measures of inequality (the Gini, Theil, Inequality Extraction Rate and Top Income Rate) are employed that show consistent results. Variation in inequality levels across late colonial Indonesia is very large, and some residencies have much higher levels of inequality (with, for example, Ginis above 60) than others (with Ginis below 30). This suggests that even within a single colony, levels of inequality may vary substantially and this puts some doubts on the representativeness of using a single number to capture the level of inequality in a large economy. In order to explain the variation across residencies and over time, this paper investigates the role of exports and plantations, so frequently mentioned in the literature. It is shown that both explain a part of the variation in levels of inequality across colonial Indonesia, but that only the rise of plantations can explain changes in inequality levels over time. This points to the importance of the institutional context in which global export trade takes place for the rise of inequality.