IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/i4rdps/126.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Comment on "Kin Networks and Institutional Development"

Author

Listed:
  • Degroot, Jean
  • Gobbi, Paula E.
  • Ramos, Alejandra
  • Wei, Xinyu

Abstract

Schulz (2022) shows how weak kin networks contributed to the rise of participatory institutions and how the medieval Catholic Church marriage regulations prohibitions contributed to the process by destroying European clan-based kin networks. Three pieces of evidence construct the argument. First, a cross-country level analysis shows that countries with cousin-term differentiation score between 2.83 and 7.66 units less in modern democracy than non-differentiating countries. The point estimates are statistically significant at the 5% level using Conley SEs either at the genetic distance or geographical distance level. Second, a historical analysis shows that one additional century of exposure to the Western Church increased the probability of a city being a commune by 12.2 and is statistically significant at the 1% level using Conley SEs with distance cutoffs of 500km or 2,500 km. Third, a 20th century analysis of voter turnover and kin network within European countries shows that doubling cousin marriage rate decreases the probability to vote by about 1.8 percentage points. Following an epidemiological approach that links the kin-network of migrant mothers country of origin to the second-generation migrant's political participation in Europe, Schulz (2022) shows that cousin-term differentiation in the country of origin of the second-generation migrant mother reduces the probability of voting. The above results are all computationally reproducible. We only identify two minor coding errors: the SE in reported in Table 3 correspond to SE clustered at the city level rather than Conley SE, and the sample size in Table 5 is incorrect. None of the errors affects the point estimates or their statistical significance. We also provide the missing code for the two figures in the paper. For the historical analysis, we conduct a robustness check on alternative sample of cities. The magnitude of the coefficients exhibits a very small variation and statistical significance of the results remains unchanged.

Suggested Citation

  • Degroot, Jean & Gobbi, Paula E. & Ramos, Alejandra & Wei, Xinyu, 2024. "A Comment on "Kin Networks and Institutional Development"," I4R Discussion Paper Series 126, The Institute for Replication (I4R).
  • Handle: RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:126
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/296191/1/I4R-DP126.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jonathan F Schulz, 2022. "Kin Networks and Institutional Development," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 132(647), pages 2578-2613.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Valencia Caicedo, Felipe & Dohmen, Thomas & Pondorfer, Andreas, 2023. "Religion and cooperation across the globe," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 215(C), pages 479-489.
    2. Mark Koyama, 2024. "Analyzing the medieval church through an economic lens," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 201(1), pages 53-60, October.
    3. Scott Claessens & Thanos Kyritsis & Quentin D. Atkinson, 2023. "Cross-national analyses require additional controls to account for the non-independence of nations," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 14(1), pages 1-13, December.
    4. Roberto Ezcurra, 2024. "Kin networks and quality of government: a regional analysis," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 73(4), pages 2117-2142, December.
    5. David de la Croix & Mara Vitale, 2023. "Women in European academia before 1800—religion, marriage, and human capital," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 27(4), pages 506-532.
    6. Li, Qiang & An, Lian & Zhang, Ren, 2023. "Corruption drives brain drain: Cross-country evidence from machine learning," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 126(C).
    7. Weber, Till O. & Schulz, Jonathan F. & Beranek, Benjamin & Lambarraa-Lehnhardt, Fatima & Gächter, Simon, 2023. "The behavioral mechanisms of voluntary cooperation across culturally diverse societies: Evidence from the US, the UK, Morocco, and Turkey," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 215(C), pages 134-152.
    8. Alberto Bisin & Jared Rubin & Avner Seror & Thierry Verdier, 2024. "Culture, institutions and the long divergence," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 29(1), pages 1-40, March.
    9. Millemaci, Emanuele & Monteforte, Fabio & Temple, Jonathan R. W., 2024. "Electing for stability: Democracy and output volatility, 1960-2019," SocArXiv m382s, Center for Open Science.
    10. Root, Hilton L., 2024. "The religious origins of state capacity in Europe and China," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 218(C), pages 456-469.
    11. Geng Niu & Yi Wang & Yang Zhou & Xu Gan, 2024. "Family ties and corporate tax avoidance," Journal of International Business Studies, Palgrave Macmillan;Academy of International Business, vol. 55(8), pages 976-996, October.
    12. Alessandra Cassar & Alejandrina Cristia & Pauline Grosjean & Sarah Walker, 2022. "It Makes a Village: Allomaternal Care and Prosociality," Discussion Papers 2022-06, School of Economics, The University of New South Wales.
    13. Kammas, Pantelis & Sarantides, Vassilis, 2024. "Historical pathogen prevalence and the radius of trust," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 162(C).

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:i4rdps:126. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.i4replication.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.