Is it different for zeros? Discriminating between models for non-negative data with many zeros

How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the 'Night of Broken' Glass in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.

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Divide and Rule or the Rule of the Divided? Evidence from Africa

Michalopoulos¹,

Papaioannou²

2011

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Spolaore. We are particularly thankful to Andy Zeitlin, Melissa Dell, Andei Shleifer, Nico Voigtländer, and Daron Acemoglu for detailed comments and useful suggestions. We also thank Nathan Nunn for providing the digitized version of Murdock's Tribal Map of Africa. A Supplementary Appendix with additional sensitivity checks is available online at: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~elias/ and http://sites.google.com/site/steliosecon/. All errors are our sole responsibility. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.© 2011 by Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. ABSTRACTWe investigate jointly the importance of contemporary country-level institutional structures and local ethnic-specific pre-colonial institutions in shaping comparative regional development in Africa. We utilize information on the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization and regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as proxied by satellite light density at night. We exploit the fact that political boundaries across the African landscape partitioned ethnic groups in different countries subjecting identical cultures to different country-level institutions. Our regression discontinuity estimates reveal that differences in countrywide institutional arrangements across the border do not explain differences in economic performance within ethnic groups. In contrast, we document a strong association between pre-colonial ethnic institutional traits and contemporary regional development. While this correlation does not necessarily identify a causal relationship, this result obtains conditional on country fixed-effects, controlling for other ethnic traits and when we focus on pairs of contiguous ethnic homelands.

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Is it different for zeros? Discriminating between models for non-negative data with many zeros

Cited by 3 publications

References 43 publications

Estimation Issues in Single Commodity Gravity Trade Models

Estimation Issues in Single Commodity Gravity Trade Models

Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany

Divide and Rule or the Rule of the Divided? Evidence from Africa

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