Household coping in war- and peacetime: Cattle sales in Rwanda, 1991–2001

The economic literature has given due attention to household coping strategies in peacetime. In contrast, little is known about such strategies in wartime. This paper studies the use of cattle as a buffer stock by Rwandan households during 1991–2001, a period characterized by civil war and genocide. It is found that the probability of selling cattle increases upon the occurrence of both peacetime and wartime covariant adverse income shocks. The peacetime cattle sales are largely explained by shifts in the household asset portfolio. In contrast, in 1994, the year of the genocide, almost half of the cattle sales were motivated by the need to buy food. However, we argue that the effectiveness of this coping strategy was severely reduced due to the wartime conditions. First, during the year of ethnic violence, cattle prices plummeted to less than half of their pre-genocide value. Second, we find that households most targeted in the violence did not sell cattle. We discuss several explanations for this latter finding.     

Narrow and scientific replication of ‘The slave trade and the origins of mistrust in Africa'

Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) argue that slave trades led to a culture of mistrust in Africa. They regress self‐reported trust from the 2005 Afrobarometer surveys on ethnicity‐specific historic slave exports. Individuals from ethnic groups that experienced high levels of slave exports are less trusting. Causality is demonstrated by instrumenting slave exports using the historic distance of each ethnic group to the coast. Our narrow replication yields identical results. The scientific replication repeats the analysis with Afrobarometer survey data from 2008, which includes two new countries and more ethnic groups. Our replication confirms the results of Nunn and Wantchekon. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.