Essays in development economics

• Main Author: Gautier, Thomas
• Other Authors: Mookherjee, Dilip
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Economics; Civil conflicts; Development; Intergroup contact; Migration
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/2144/43176

This dissertation consists of three chapters in development economics which investigate questions related to intergroup contact and the consequences of civil conflicts. In the first chapter, I study how refugee networks influence social integration in the host community in the context of Turkey, a country that has been profoundly impacted by the arrival of more than 3.5 million Syrian refugees since 2011. Using a rich dataset on the mobile phone communications of Syrian refugees, I construct village-level measures of refugee presence and social integration. In villages with a larger refugee population, refugees made significantly more phone calls to locals and other refugees, and a higher proportion of their calls were placed to locals. I argue that refugee networks made it easier for their members to interact with locals by sharing information on local norms and creating new opportunities to meet locals. The second chapter examines how the cost of inter-ethnic contact influences inter-ethnic relations. The study uses the staggered improvements of the Indonesian road network during the 1990s and shows that it lowered the cost of intergroup contact. The resulting enhancement in access to other ethnic groups led to increasing rates of inter-ethnic marriages. The third chapter investigates the long-run effects of civil conflicts on human capital that owe their impact to family structure. Specifically, I study how the loss of a sibling during the 1994 genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda affected surviving children. The loss of a sibling had positive effects on human capital and negative effects on wealth. I argue that these results are consistent with standard models of fertility choice, although other mechanisms could also have played a role.