21/1/2021
Online Seminar at January 22nd：Gabriel Fuentes-Cordoba (Sophia University)
Date: January 22, 2021
Time: 17:15-18:45
Venue: Online Seminar in Zoom
Organizer: Kohei Kamaga and Mingchao Sun
Speaker: Gabriel Fuentes-Cordoba (Sophia University)
Language: English
Title: Violence and trust: Evidence from the 1999 East Timorese crisis (jointly with Takuya Hasebe and Mingchao Sun)
Abstract:On August 30 1999, Timor-Leste rejected a proposal for special autonomy in a referendum. This led to Timor-Leste's separation from Indonesia. The aftermath of the referendum resulted in widespread violence, mass destruction of property, and the forced displacement of families. We use the 1999 crisis to understand how exposure to violence affect individual trust towards neighbors, which is an important component of social capital. We combine violence data from the Suco Survey in Timor-Leste with household data from the 2007 Timor-Leste Survey Living Standards. OLS results suggest a small negative correlation between living in areas with high intensity of violence during the 1999 crisis and trust. Then, we employ an instrumental variables (IV) strategy to mitigate possible omitted variable bias concerns. IV results indicate a positive association between violence and trust.