文章已发布于文库，请移步讨论。 https://bbs.pinggu.org/thread-3591765-1-1.html To impress you with Economics’ imperialism, Ifeel like introducing a few papers ofeconomichistorywhich most peopleconfuse with history of economic thoughts. If I were asked how economicscontributes to thestudy of history, my answer would be: economics sheds light on how history persists. Enjoy! The "African Dummy"in the title refers to a "discriminating"identificationstrategythat when dealing with observations on countries, economistsalways add anindicator variable of Africa tothe regressors. Itreflects the fact that Africaneconomiesare consistentlylagging the performance of the rest of world. What is the reason for that? What’s unique on the Africa continent in history? The onlyanswerappears slave trade. But through which specific channel did the slave trade operate to reduce Africa’s productivity? Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon’s paper, The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa , discussed one possible channel-mistrust. Their main argumentis that individuals that belong to an ethnic group from which more slaves were taken during the trans-Atlantic slave trade exhibit lower levels of trust today.The s econdary channelis thatindividuals living in areas from which moreslaves were taken exhibit lower levels of trust today. They have individualsurvey data on contemporary level of trust and the slave data is from Nunn’s another paper (2008).Then the estimationis to regress measures of the individual's trustonmeasures of slave exports for the ethnicity to which the individual belongs. But reverse causality is likely: moreslaves were taken from populations that were less trusting at the beginning (and thus less trusting today) . One solution is IV estimate. They use distance from the coast as an instrument for slave trade, a similar strategy to Nunn’s previous study (2008). Butit seems to me that the exclusion restriction is not satisfied. The other solutionthey came up with is an inspiration. They did a falsification test based on the logic thatif their story is correct, we should find no influence of distance from the coast on trust in locations other than Africa. Of course the results survived.
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