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Historical Slavery Predicts Contemporary Violent Crime

Author

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  • Moamen Gouda
  • Anouk S. Rigterink

Abstract

This study investigates the long-term relationship between slavery and violent crime in the USA. Although qualitative evidence suggests that slavery perpetuated violence, there has been no large-N study supporting this claim. Using county-level data, we find that the percentage of slaves in the population in 1860 is linked with violent crime in 2000. This result is specific to violent crime, robust to instrumenting for slavery and varying the approach to missing crime data, and not driven by biased crime reporting. Investigating the theoretical mechanisms driving these results, we find that historical slavery affects inequality (like Bertocchi and Dimico, 2014), white Americans’ political attitudes towards race (like Acharya et al., 2016b) and black American’s political attitudes – in opposite directions. Results suggest that inequality and black American’s political attitudes mediate the observed effect on violent crime in general, but that white American’s political attitudes mediate the effect on interracial violence.

Suggested Citation

  • Moamen Gouda & Anouk S. Rigterink, 2024. "Historical Slavery Predicts Contemporary Violent Crime," CESifo Working Paper Series 11515, CESifo.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11515
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    File URL: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp11515.pdf
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    slavery; crime; inequality; political attitude; violence; US South;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J15 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Minorities, Races, Indigenous Peoples, and Immigrants; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J71 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Discrimination - - - Hiring and Firing
    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law
    • N31 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - U.S.; Canada: Pre-1913
    • D70 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - General

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