When the times they’re not a changin’: essays on the persistent effects of religion, investments, and ancestry on economic, social, and political behaviors at the subnational level

Les temps changent-ils ?: essais sur la persistance des effets de la religion, les investissements, et les origines culturelles, sur les comportements économiques et sociaux au niveau local

Valeria Rueda

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Abstract: Individual and social behaviors, such as voting patterns, the ability to trust others, participation in the community, health-seeking behaviors, or attitudes towards contraception, can persist over many years. Relying on new historical and contemporary data sources, the works compiled in this thesis aim at explaining and quantifying rigorously instances of persistence in behaviors and preferences. This work presents three contributions to the literature. Firstly, it compiles a new micro-level geocoded historical datasource on missionary activity in sub-Saharan Africa. Secondly, it has elucidated, in original ways, channels of persistence in development, which are not attributable to formal institutions. Thirdly, it has analyzed the intensive margin of diversity, providing a new way to address the endogeneity issue in the study of the role of diversity on income. The first part of the thesis is a work on the long-lasting influence of missionary activity in sub-Saharan Africa. I present there the research I have conducted with Julia Cagé. It relies a new database that we constructed and geocoded based on the Geography and Atlas of Protestant missions. This research is developed in the two first chapters of the thesis. The second part of this thesis studies the social conditions under which ancestry differences act as a persistent barrier for individual earnings in the United States. The United States is a natural choice to study the persistent effect of ancestry on income, as this is a country that was populated by subsequent waves of migration from different origins during a relatively short period of time. Moreover, the American Census Bureau has recorded data about ancestries since the 1850s.

Keywords: Historical persistence; Development; Christian missions; Ethnic diversity; Persistance historique; Développement; Missions chrétiennes; Diversité ethnique (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-09-26
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://theses.hal.science/tel-03464543
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Published in Economics and Finance. Institut d'études politiques de paris - Sciences Po, 2016. English. ⟨NNT : 2016IEPP0027⟩

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