RESEARCH

Political leaders make policy choices which are often hard to explain via institutions. We use the behavior of Colombian paramilitary groups as an environment to study non-institutional sources of variation in how public good provision and violence are combined to control populations. We hypothesize that a significant source of variation stems from the social preferences of the paramilitary commanders. Reciprocators adopt a strategy of offering public goods in exchange for support, but also use violence to punish those who do not reciprocate back. Reciprocity, developed via childhood socialization, is a characteristic of rural “peasants”. We develop a model which generates these hypotheses and test them using a unique dataset compiled from transitional justice documents.

This paper examines the persistent effects of Crown versus settler colonialism. Exploiting a spatial regression discontinuity design in Mexico, I document that regions where the relative power of the colonial state over settler elites was higher exhibit higher historical and contemporary economic prosperity. In contrast to the view that Crown judges disproportionately weakened property rights, court records analyzed with natural language processing algorithms suggest they constrained settlers from expropriating indigenous lands. In the long-run, a feedback loop appears to have consolidated an emerging rural middle class, whose relative enfranchisement tied it less to patronage politics, encouraging public good provision and labor mobility out of agriculture.

This study examines the intergenerational effects of providing land to the rural poor. I use ID numbers to track applicants to the 1968 Colombian agrarian reform and their children in various administrative data. Exploiting discontinuities in the allocation of parcels, I find that the children of recipients exhibit higher intergenerational mobility. In contrast to the view that land would tie them to the countryside, today these children participate more in the modern economy. They have better living standards and are more likely to work in formal and high-skilled sectors. These findings appear driven by a relief of credit constraints that allowed recipient families to migrate to urban centers and invest in the education of their children.

This paper examines the effects of African ethnic institutions on economic development in the Americas through the lens of the Colombian Pacific lowlands. We trace the African origins of Afro-Colombians by linking a wealth of ethnographical sources with contemporary micro-level data on surnames, a strong marker for ethnic origins in the region. Exploiting discontinuities along arbitrarily-defined geographical boundaries of Afro-Colombian community councils (ACCs), we find preliminary evidence of a reversal of fortunes. First, in contrast to the view that slavery broke ethnic ties, African ethnic institutions predict contemporary community council institutions. Second, individuals whose ancestors came from more economically developed ethnicities — characterized by centralized governance but loose kinship ties — exhibit worse living standards today. Based on evolutionary anthropology insights, we hypothesize that institutional mismatch explains why opposite African ethnic institutions — decentralized governance and tight kinship ties — may have been more useful for adapting to their new environment.