Ancestral Ways of Life and Human Capital Formation in Kenya
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Ancestral Ways of Life and Human Capital Formation in Kenya David Wuepper 1
2
& Hannes Lang & Emmanuel Benjamin
3
Received: 5 March 2017 / Accepted: 6 June 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
There is a rich literature on the importance of historical agriculture as long-term shaper of culture, institutions, and economic development. How much this changes over time, however, we understand much less. In Kenya, we compare the educational attainment between individuals with nomadic and non-nomadic ancestors over time and find a large and quite persistent gap in all periods that we examine (2006, 2009, 2013, 2016) as well as in different age cohorts. We find an especially large gap for individuals with nomadic ancestors who live in rural areas and who are women. In urban areas, we also do find evidence for some, recent improvement, but only when we restrict the comparison group to individuals from other non-English and non-Swahili speaking ethnicities. Keywords Human capital . Historical persistence . Intergenerational mobility
1 Introduction There is a large body of empirical evidence that historical legacies matter for economic development (Nunn 2009; Alesina and Giuliano 2015; Nunn 2020). One branch of this Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10888-02009450-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
* David Wuepper [email protected] Hannes Lang [email protected] Emmanuel Benjamin [email protected]
1
Agricultural Economics and Policy Group, ETH Zurich, Sonneggstrasse 33, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland
2
Governance in International Agribusiness, TU Munich, Alte Akademie, 1285354 Freising, Germany
3
Agriculture and Food, TU Munich, Alte Akademie 12, 85354 Freising, Germany
D. Wuepper et al.
literature examines the role of historical agriculture as a shaper of long-term cultural, institutional, and economic outcomes. There is empirical evidence that individuals whose ancestors relied more on agriculture tend to be more peaceful, more patient, complete more education, and have considerably higher incomes currently (Grosjean 2014; Michalopoulos et al. 2018; Alesina et al. 2019). Moreover, among the descendants of farmers, those whose ancestors lived in places with more investment-favoring growing conditions tend to have more patience (Galor and Özak 2016), higher self-efficacy, and a more internal locus of control (Wuepper and Drosten 2017; Ross 2018; Wuepper et al. 2019). An important criticism voiced by Austin (2008) is a possible “compression of history”. The issue is that usually two points in time are connected to each other, e.g. historic growing conditions or reliance on agriculture and a current economic phenomenon, such as educational attainment. The first shortcoming is that it is possible that empirical patterns are not stable over time, so only looking at one recent period can sometimes give a snapshot rather than the general pattern (Austin 2008; Pinkovsk
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