Does ethnicity predict culture? William Easterly

Ethnicity and Culture Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales: culture = “those customary beliefs and values that ethnic, religious, and social groups transmit fairly unchanged from generation to generation.”

Migration Debate concerned about Adverse Cultural Effects of Some Migrants Borjas: poor migrants bring “the culture and norms that led to poor economic conditions in the sending countries in the first place.” Borjas quotes Collier: “Uncomfortable as it may be . . . migrants bring their culture with them.” Clemens and Pritchett (2016) call these arguments “the new economic case for migration restrictions.” But which migrants bring adverse culture?

Another analyst on ethnicity, culture, and migration “Madmen in authority….are distilling their frenzy from some academic”

Four Questions about Characterizing the Culture of a particular Ethnic Group (1) Is there an ethnic effect of this group on culture? (2) Is an ethnic effect robust across different measures of culture? (3) Is an ethnic effect spurious because it is standing in for something else, like income, education, or country effects? (4) Does the individual variance within the ethnic group swamp any ethnic effect on average? These are different questions than the “Culture Matters” literature asks.

World Values Survey 2010-2012 Over 80,000 individuals surveyed in 59 countries Ethnic groups coded by religion and race Use here 13 questions on Trust (5), Women’s Rights (4), Violence (4) Literature and Development Policy clear on which are assumed to be the “Good” cultural values Agreement or disagreement, sometimes intermediate All answers inverted if necessary so that increase is “good”, decrease is “bad” Rescaled 0 (worst) to 1 (best) This measure of “Good culture” negatively correlated with Poverty

Significance? Magnitude? Robust across cultural dimensions?

Is the Muslim effect spurious? Robust to individual characteristics like income and education? Robust to country effects, which may capture non-ethnic factors like institutions or history?

Results on a placebo ethnic group

How much explanatory (i.e. predictive) power do ethnic dummies have?

Histograms for overall Culture Index for Muslims (left) and Non-Muslims (right) Difference in means is .06 (falls to .006 with Country Dummies & Individual Chars) Non-Muslims Muslims

Partial Scatter Plot Between Culture Residuals (Vertical Axis) and Muslim Dummy (Horizontal Axis)

How well does ethnicity predict culture? Statistically significant? SOMETIMES YES Quantitatively meaningful? NO Consistent across alternative measures of cultural dimensions? NO Robust to controls for individual characteristics or other ethnic group memberships? NO Dominates heterogeneity within each group? NO

Conclusions Nothing here disputes that “Culture Matters” in general But descriptive cultural statements about particular ethnicities are usually not robust Poor explanatory power of ethnic membership for culture So ethnic profiling of migrants would not work to screen out “bad culture”