N. Nunn (Harvard University) - paper replication & critique 🌍 🚢 | Edoardo Falchi
This project implements Instrumental Variable technique, and is about replicating the main findings (plots and tables) from the paper
Nunn N. The Long Term Effects of Africa's Slave Trades. Quarterly Journal of Economics. 2008; 123 (1) : 139-176
His research question is:
Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa’s slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades and use instrumental variables. Together the evidence suggests that the slave trades had an adverse effect on economic development.
What this project does not include is questioning the author's aurgumentations. For a detailed evidence examination please refer to the author's paper which he made freely available on his Harvard webiste along with the dataset.
However, in the Critique section, I point out some flaws which I think weaken Nunn's results and some improvements which I personally suggest are worth considering, namely:
- weak instrument
- use of Heteroskedasticity-Consistent standard errors
➡️ best way to view the Rmarkdown report: click here for the rendered html notebook
Enjoy! 😊