Title: Consequences of the Black Sea Slave Trade: Long-Run Development in Eastern Europe

Authors: Volha Charnysh and Ranjit Lall

Abstract: We investigate the developmental consequences of slave-raiding in Eastern Europe, the largest source of slaves in the early modern world after West Africa. Drawing on a wide-ranging new dataset, we estimate that at least 5 million people were enslaved from 735 locations across the region between the 15th and 18th centuries. We hypothesize that, over time, slave raids encouraged an economically advantageous process of defensive state-building linked to raided societies' resistance to and lack of integration into the slave trade. Using difference-in-differences and instrumental variables strategies, we find that exposure to raids is positively associated with long-run urban growth and several related indicators of demographic and commercial development. Consistent with our posited mechanism, raided areas constructed more robust defenses and attained higher levels of administrative, military, and fiscal capacity. Our findings suggest that the structure of slave production conditions its developmental legacies, cautioning against drawing generalizations from the African context.

Title: Family culture and childcare policies (with Francesca Carta and Lorenzo De Masi)

Abstract: We analyze the influence of past family culture on contemporary preferences for public childcare among U.S. natives and current legislative activity in the House of Representatives. We proxy family culture using historical family principles - equal inheritance and cohabitation- that characterize family structures prior to modern welfare states (Todd, 1983), thus minimizing reverse causality issues. By employing the prevalent family principles in the ancestral countries of origin, we effectively isolate the influence of family culture from other institutional and economic factors. Results from the General Social Survey (GSS) indicate that individuals with ancestors from egalitarian countries are more prone to advocate for public spending in childcare, while those with forebears cohabiting in large family units tend to rely less on formal childcare. Similarly, U.S. representatives from districts with a widespread egalitarian culture among the population's ancestry, as estimated by census data, sponsor more child-related bills, whereas those from cohabitation-oriented districts sponsor less. These findings are specific to children's policies and remain consistent despite political selection. Furthermore, we manually collect extensive genealogical data to identify each politician's ancestral family background. Our findings demonstrate that family culture of congressional districts consistently influences their representatives' legislative engagement with children's policies even when controlling for the politician's own family culture. This provides conclusive evidence that representatives prioritize their constituents' preferences over their own.

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