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Ömer Özak and his coauthor explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary non-civil conflict in Africa. Exploiting variations across artificial regions (i.e., grids of 50x50km) within an ethnicity’s historical homeland, they document that both the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are concentrated close to historical ethnic borders. Following a theory-based instrumental variable approach, which generates a plausibly exogenous ethno-spatial partition of Africa, they find that grid cells with historical ethnic borders have 27 percentage points higher probability of conflict and 7.9 percentage points higher probability of being the initial location of a conflict. In this Quantitative History Webinar, Ömer will share their findings and explain in great detail the key underlying mechanisms: competition for agricultural land, population pressure, cultural similarity and weak property rights.

Ömer’s coauthor is Emilio Depetris-Chauvin (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile).

Live on Zoom on October 15, 2020
09:00 Hong Kong/Beijing/Singapore | 10:00 Tokyo | 12:00 Sydney
20:00 Previous day Dallas Time | 21:00 Previous day New York Time

A new knowledge exchange platform for researchers and students in the field of Economic History. The interactive Webinars help researchers, teachers and students keep up to date with the latest research in the field. The Quantitative History Webinar Series is co-organised by the Asia Global Institute and Faculty of Business and Economics at HKU, and proudly supported by the International Society for Quantitative History.