Stress, Ethnicity, and Prosocial Behavior Johannes Haushofer, Sara Lowes, Nathan Nunn, Abednego Musau, Moritz Poll, David Ndetei and Nancy Qian Abstract While observational evidence suggests that people behave more prosocially towards members of their own ethnic group, many laboratory studies fail to find this effect. One possible explanation is that coethnic preference only emerges […]
BREAD Working Paper No. 594, July 2021
The Political-Economic Causes of the Soviet Great Famine, 1932–33 Andrei Markevich, Natalya Naumenko and Nancy Qian Abstract This study constructs a large new dataset to investigate whether state policy led to ethnic Ukrainians experiencing higher mortality during the 1932–33 Soviet Great Famine. All else equal, famine (excess) mortality rates were positively associated with ethnic Ukrainian […]
BREAD Working Paper No. 526, November 2017
The Rise and Fall of Local Elections in China: Theory and Empirical Evidence on the Autocrat’s Trade-off Monica Martinez-Bravo, Gerard Padró i Miquel, Nancy Qian, Yang Yao Abstract We propose a simple informational theory to explain why autocratic regimes introduce lo- cal elections. Because citizens have better information on local officials than the distant central […]
BREAD Working Paper No. 527, November 2017
The Long-run Effects of Agricultural Productivity on Conflict, 1400-1900 Murat Iyigun, Nathan Nunn, Nancy Qian Abstract This paper provides evidence of the long-run effects of a permanent increase in agricultural productivity on conflict. We construct a newly digitized and geo-referenced dataset of battles in Europe, the Near East and North Africa covering the period be- […]