Chris Blattman

Chris Blattman

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Evidence that ethnic divisions are counterproductive. Literally.

Ray Fisman gets credit for the title, Jonas Hjort gets credit for his paper on how ethnic divisions on productivity:

In team production at a plant in Kenya, an upstream worker supplies and distributes flowers to two downstream workers who assemble them into bunches.

The plant uses an essentially random rotation process to assign workers to positions, leading to three types of teams: (a) ethnically homogeneous teams, and teams in which (b) one or (c) both downstream workers belong to a tribe in rivalry with the upstream worker’s tribe.

I find strong evidence that upstream workers undersupply non-coethnic downstream workers (vertical discrimination) and shift flowers from non-coethnic to coethnic downstream workers (horizontal discrimination), at the cost of lower own pay and total output.

A period of ethnic conflict following Kenya’s 2007 election led to a sharp increase in discrimination. In response, the plant began paying the two downstream workers for their combined output (team pay). This led to a modest output reduction in (a) and (c) teams – as predicted by standard incentive models – but an increase in output in (b) teams, and overall. Workers’ behavior before conflict, during conflict, and under team pay is predicted by a model of taste-based discrimination.

Humans depress me yet again.

And a footnote to the academics who worry that field experiments are taking over the discipline, or the grad students who think they need to do an experiment (a hear this a lot, especially in political science): I think this paper is a great example how observational work (when well done) can be better, more interesting, and harder. And I think these papers get rewarded more.

Here’s my advice post on why grad students should think twice about field experiments for their dissertations.

42 Responses

  1. Moi said that Kenya was not ready for democracy because of the rancid nature of the tribalism. Those killed on the coast in late July were all Kikuyu outside their own tribal area. I arrived just after it and the Kikuyu taxi driver in Nairobi was telling me what they were going to do to for it. It is not just about flowers. So they need a field survey to prove it. Eh. Just buy the Daily Nation. Horrendous.

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