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Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Econ_Prejudice (The Economics of Ethnic Prejudice)

Teaser

Summary

What determines identification of individuals with a particular group such as ethnic or religions groups? When group differences become more salient and ultimately result in conflict and when, in contrast, they disappear as a result of contact between the groups? What economic, social, and political factors affect group identification, behavior, and beliefs of different groups? This project aims at understanding the roots of the formation and the salience of different aspects of group identity. The project addresses these questions using state of the art empirical analysis in both historical and contemporary settings. The work is organized around three pillars, focusing on social, economic, and political factors, respectively.

Work performed

The first part of the project makes use of the two historical experiments generated by forced mass movements of ethnic groups in Eastern Europe and from Eastern Europe to Siberia and Central Asia as a result of political decisions made during and right after World War II. The first experiment allows us to study how self-identification and preferences adjust as a result of shocks to environmental or institutional conditions and how these shock-induced preferences persist in subsequent generations. Forced migration is a life-changing experience, leaving deep scars in the memory of expellees. Does such experience also affect subsequent generations and how? In particular, previous literature has hypothesized that forced migration could lead to a shift in preferences, away from material possessions and towards investment in mobile and inalienable assets, such as human capital. Based on their experience, forced migrants evaluate the chances of losing material possessions in the future differently from people who were not displaced in the past. This â€œuprootednessâ€ hypothesis has proved extremely hard to test because forced migrants typically differ from locals along other socio-economic and cultural characteristics such as ethnicity, language, and religion. Even for the most prominent case â€“ that of the Jews â€“ previous literature has convincingly challenged the idea that expulsions are the main driver of their initial educational lead. Using a unique historical setting, we provide the first convincing test of this hypothesis: After World War II, the Polish borders were redrawn, resulting in large-scale forced and voluntary migration. Poles were forced to move from the territories in the East (taken over by the USSR) and were resettled mostly to the newly acquired Western Territories, from which Germans were expelled. Using historical census data combined with novel surveys, we show that, while there were no pre-WWII differences in education, Poles with a family history of forced migration are significantly more educated today. We also show that forced migration led to a shift in preferences, away from material possessions and towards investment in a mobile asset â€“ human capital. The effects persist over three generations. As the next step in this analysis, we plan to examine how the environment at the origin locations shaped self-identification of forced Polish migrants with the core components of Polish culture.
The second historical experiment used in this part of the project allows to study cultural diffusion between different ethnic and religious groups. What happens when people get exposed to another culture? Do they accept or reject it? Do cultural traits diffuse or does the exposure to a new culture breed stronger identification with oneâ€™s own? We focus on a unique episode in history in which close co-existence of different groups was exogenously imposed in a real-word setting without constraints on the interaction between groups. This happened when Stalin deported 2.1 million people from the Western part of the USSR to Siberia and to the Central Asian republics between 1939 and 1944. The entire ethnic groups, such as Germans, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Meskhetian Turks, etc. were deported by force. The sole reason for their deportation was that their ethnicity was suspected of collaboration with the Nazis or of activities against the Soviets during WWII. As a result of these ethnic deportations, the native local population at the destination locations was exposed to deportees of different ethnicities and different cultures. In particular, gender norms sharply differed between Muslim deportees from the North Caucasus and Protestant deportees from the North-West of the USSR. We focus on the effect of being exposed to deportees from different religious groups on this cultural trait. We use a novel and fine-grained dataset on the exact deportation locations and their ethnic composition collected in the recently declas

Final results

Overall, this ERC project breaks the new grounds in the economic literature on diversity and culture by documenting social, economic, and political factors influencing the formation of self-identification and ethnic animosity. This is an important research agenda because socially- and economically-created ethnic tensions provide members of the groups with sets of beliefs and attitudes that play an important role in social, economic and political development and affect the design, implementation, and effectiveness of social policies. In addition to scientific results, the project creates value by collecting extremely rich data sets, which will be made available to researchers upon publication of our work. These data as well as the ideas created by our research will give rise to many new research projects (both by the our research team and by others), which will strengthen further our understanding of causes and consequences of ethnic prejudices and conflict.