The Legacy of Concertaje in Ecuador

This chapter summarizes the work in Rivadeneira (2023), where I use hand-collected and digitized historical tax records from Ecuador’s Spanish colonial regime to estimate the long-run effects of a forced labor institution named concertaje. This institution, which lasted for more than 300 years, allowed landlords to retain indigenous workers due to unpaid debts and forced them to work in rural estates known as haciendas. To identify its causal effects, I exploit variations in its intensity caused by differences in crops’ labor requirements. I first report that an increase of 10 percentage points in concertaje rate increments contemporary poverty by 4.2 percentage points. I then explore several channels of persistence that might explain those results. As hacienda workers used to inherit their status to children, the latter typically substituted school for work. Consequently, districts with higher concertaje rates have been historically associated with lower educational levels. In addition, the voting restrictions for illiterates cast them away from public affairs, reflected in a reduced provision of public goods like roads. I also report that due to restricted labor mobility, concertaje is associated with a higher fraction of people working nowadays in the agricultural sector.