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Institutions, Governance, and Growth

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 4, 2025 12:30 PM - 2:15 PM (PST)

Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Union Square 11
Hosted By: Economic History Association
  • Chair: Jacob Hall, University of Pennsylvania

Long Upon the Land: The Economic Legacy of Slavery in the Borderlands

Hoyt Bleakley
,
University of Michigan
Paul W. Rhode
,
University of Michigan

Abstract

Many observers in the antebellum United States saw the contrast between Free Soil and the region where slavery was still legal. In prior work, we investigated the economic and social differences in the Free Soil-Slavery Legal borderlands in the 1850s, on the eve of the Civil War. We found that land on the slave side was substantially under-utilized. The proposed paper extends the analysis to the post-bellum period. A naïve view would be emancipation would lead to immediate convergence across the borderlands. This view ignores the persistent impact of social forces generated by the slavery-legal vs. free soil regimes; the differential impact of the Civil War including the secession of parts—principally eastern Virginia—but not all of the border South from the Union; war-time destruction; post-war disruption arising from the change in the property rights regime; and the effects of Reconstruction policies, including military occupation of parts, but not all of the region. There is sufficient variation with region to potentially sort out the impact of forces leading to local convergence or divergence. We will use our research project 's border design, as it isolates the effect of the legacy of having legal slavery. Our preliminary analysis indicates the gaps in rural population density and farm values in the border region closed slowly, over a period of 5-7 decades. It is noteworthy that this convergence was coincident with the diminution in the differences in the non-white population density along the border, which suggests the salience of race-based policies of “social control”.

The Changing Perceptions of Corruption in France, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States between 1800 and 2019

Rui Esteves
,
Geneva Graduate Institute
Andrey Eydlin
,
Geneva Graduate Institute

Abstract

Corruption in public office receives great attention among scholars, policymakers, and the general public due to the heavy social burden associated with it. The first step to understanding corruption, its causes and consequences is to measure it. The main cross-country corruption indicators used today are based on perceptions. These are aggregated from surveys of specialists, businessmen and local populations and start in the 1990s. In this paper we develop a new methodology to compute an Historical Corruption Index (HCI) going back to the early 19th century. As we cannot survey past individuals, we resort to the database of books digitized by Google and that can be interrogated as N-grams. We create historically-sensitive corruption dictionaries and apply them to the corpora of books in English (British and American), French and Russian. We validate the resulting HCI with contemporary leading measures of corruption perceptions for the period where the Google database overlaps with the latter. We then use a factor model to extract two latent factors from the raw data. The first maps on to traditional forms of abuse of public office (bribery, embezzlement) and is dominant until the early 20th century. The second factor is more prominent since and is associated with forms of clientelism and cronyism. We conclude that the timing of the two factors aligns with the national histories of corruption in the four nations covered and also with the broad historical changes in the organization of the civil service and the relation between state and the private sector.

The Negus and the Monks: Monasteries, State Formation and Long-Run Development in Ethiopia, 1270-2020

Mattia Bertazzini
,
University of Nottingham

Abstract

Is Africa 's historical lack of stable indigenous institutions important in explaining her economic performance in the 20th and 21st centuries? This paper explores this question by studying the mechanics and the effect of early centralization Ethiopia, the only African state that enjoyed sufficient military and fiscal capacity to maintain its independence throughout the middle ages and the colonial era. In a flexible regression discontinuity design (RDD) at multiple historical boundaries, the paper shows that longer exposure to centralized institutions translates into people being richer and more likely to display ethnic, linguistic and religious traits related to the traditional Ethiopian cultural identity today. Ethiopian monarchs (Negus) relied heavily on the Ethiopian orthodox church to buttress their authority and to build state infrastructure. The analysis of the mechanisms suggests that the effects are stronger for periods and boundaries when the Ethiopian state used the church systematically, within a general program of state expansion, to project power across its territory.
JEL Classifications
  • N3 - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy
  • D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making