The Influence of Ancestral Lifeways on Individual Economic Outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa
结合人类学记录与个人调查数据，研究撒哈拉以南非洲个体祖先在工业化前对农业的依赖程度如何影响其当前的教育和财富水平，发现来自农业依赖度更高的族群的人如今更富裕、受教育程度更高。
Abstract Does a person's historical lineage influence his or her current economic status? Motivated by a large literature in the social sciences stressing the effect of an early transition to agriculture on current economic performance at the country level, we examine the relative contemporary status of individuals as a function of how much their ancestors relied on agriculture during the preindustrial era. We focus on Africa, where—by combining anthropological records of groups with individual-level survey data—we can explore the effect of the historical lifeways of one's forefathers. Within enumeration areas (typically a single village or group of villages in the countryside and a city block in urban areas) as well as occupational groups, we find that individuals from ethnicities that derived a larger share of subsistence from agriculture in the precolonial era are today more educated and wealthy. A tentative exploration of channels suggests that differences in attitudes and beliefs as well as differential treatment by others, including differential political power, may contribute to these divergent outcomes.