NES Center for the Study of Diversity and Social Interactions and HSE International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development are happy to invite you to our joint meeting of the Research Seminar on Diversity and Development and HSE Seminar on Political Economy.
Alexander Yarkin (Brown University) will present the paper “Diseases, diversity, and out-group attitudes: Evidence from 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak and historical pathogen prevalence”.
Registration: till 4 p.m. of April 28, link will be sent before 5 p.m.
Abstract:
In this paper, I explore the persistence and change in the attitudes towards diversity – people’s views on various out-group members based on ethnic, racial, linguistic, cultural and other identity lines. Specifically, I address the role of historical disease prevalence and contemporary epidemics in shaping these attitudes. First, I utilize the historical data on the prevalence of several infectious diseases to show that larger risks of contracting a novel pathogen historically map into worse out-group attitudes today. This result holds for various measures of out-group attitudes and several identification strategies. Second, I explore the case of West African Ebola outbreak in 2014-2016 to show that, indeed, an exposure to a larger Ebola shock leads to lower national, as opposed to ethnic, identity at the local level. However, there exists a large heterogeneity in the effects of Ebola: people living in regions that (i) were more ethnically diverse, and (ii) had more trust in strangers to begin with, actually show an increase in their national identity. Thus, massive social shocks, such as deadly epidemics, may increase polarization in social attitudes.