First question, I would say like can you guys just give a bit of an overview about your background in the area or what particularly drew each of you to study sort of this topic and economics?
Yeah, I guess each of us came from a different direction in a way but I like my research is mostly related to kinship in developing countries, like African listening, original research on and yeah, one of the big parts that are one of the behaviors or like social phenomena that like makes for very strong kinship groups is cousin marriage, so interested in what are the causal effects of marriage? And then Simon, I had a conversation which started the whole project, but it was because So yeah, you can say like here and
then he was interested in kinship and I was interested in in general area of research is related to like marriage market, matching market. So for example, matching between students in schools like public schools and school students. So and then, you know, the tall fan okay, let's do something together. So I'm interested in marriage matching and you're interested in kinship. So because marriage Yeah, that's that's a national newspaper
in India.
Cast in your paper on that night where I studied the class marriages and what happens when people try to subsidize communities. So anyway, normally
you always marry within your caste. The government wants to get people to marry. Similar to it's related to this American.
So that's how we all started this project. Yeah,
I'm speaking to the economic consequences paper. I found it really interesting that you opened with a quote that talks about how studying kinship societies is to explore the economics of under development. How do you each of you interpret that quote, in your research
I mean, for me really like I'm, I'm a development economist. And this is like a paper about the US like a historical dream of the US but I really think that like one of the big one of the important, like determinants of development is family structure. across countries or across societies. And that when you like, the amazing thing about this historical US data is that you can kind of follow people and follow families over a very long period of time with good data on people for like, you know, 150 years, or kids or grandkids. You can actually study changes in marriage patterns, and then how that affects the lives of the people who come afterwards whereas you wouldn't be able to do that in developing country today. But but that the reason I'm interested in this is because of the fact that in developing countries today, kinship networks are really strong and important and that could be a major like, factor in what explains why they have the domino company.
So I guess he, he wrote that he found the code and he put it on paper. And when I read that code, and I'm not I don't, I'm not a development economist. So when I read that, quote, Oh, it's okay. Of course, I was like, okay, that's really cool. But then, I think to test testing that that that's an hypothesis that draws me like kinship structure needs to causally lead to under development. That's a fake prophecies. And I think I was like, Okay, we should we should test this in whichever way we can. And that's the economic consequences papers. View papers that actually tested sort of convincingly. Yeah.
Like, I don't deserve to have to say this, but like, just kind of zoom out of it. It's obvious when you look at just the distribution countries around the world or even how things change over history that like poverty and having development is very closely tied to very tight and strong kinship groups. But it's very possible that the causation runs in that direction, like being poor, forces you to rely on your family because the government's aren't there to help you market somewhere else and you don't have enough savings to deal with shocks happen. So you need this really tight network at least to help you and you're in trouble. So you need like, a group of people who will protect you and who will defend you and who will help you when you're in times of need all kind of stuff. So that's like, so those things go together. But the question is, like, is it the fact that pot like poverty or under development or you know, weak governments that can protect their population causes network? Kinship networks could be strong, or is it that strong kinship networks, like, prevent or make it harder for countries to industrialize, moderniser grow economically or have like, stable democracies or that was another you find is that like countries that have strong kinship networks, usually are not Democratic or have very weak axes? Yeah, so like, the point of our paper was just to try to like figure out whether the kinship network itself can have a causal effect on the on development and this was
Yeah, I was gonna ask the like relevance to contemporary development, but you answered that very well already. So unless you want to add anything about why even though the research might draw on data that's from the, like, 20th century that it's still very relevant to contemporary economics.
90 Because century. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I think it's like, in both of those, both of the papers, we argue, you know, you can believe us or not, but we argue that, like, we're, we're using the US historical US data because it's like convenient to study what we want to study for the first paper. The other nice thing is that which is bad because of marriage, so it gives you like, this kind of exogenous thing that changes the future. But yeah, we think that the questions are interesting because they matter today a lot like there's a lot of countries today that have not even just cousin marriage, although that is one of the big things, but the happy is like strong kinship networks. And we're interested in like, what are the consequences?
Yeah, I think I mean, some people think that people have claimed that pathotype cause effect on development, but it's very difficult. I mean, I think it's very difficult to find some variation, exogenous variation, that affects the family, like the kinship structure, throughout the economy, throughout the history, all over the world. Right. And then we totally understand that, yes, right now, in some countries like Pakistan, this is a huge deal like their you know, their their customers 4040 50% is very difficult to see to try to do this type of evaluation in the contemporary so I think that's it's really difficult in like, not just contemporary but also in the old days. So this variation in when the customers was states there was a golden opportunity for people at cost to actually study if it's an effect. So yeah,
yeah, I'm specifically talking about the health effects paper, I understand that it's conditionally accepted working paper right now. Are we are Yeah, are we allowed to say when that's like coming out or
just got accepted where I just have to send in the data and the code, but I guess once you do that, it'll be forthcoming.
Well, I
get an email if you want.
Yeah, so I'm talking about that one specifically. I think like a lot of research in the past focuses on childhood but in the paper, it says that you pick to focus on the entire lifespan of individuals born to first cousins. Was there a specific reason why you chose to focus on the entire lifespan rather than the childhood or earlier years?
Obviously, you would want to like, of course, if you want to know about the effects of your cousin you would like to know, on your kid, you would like to know, like, how does that affect their entire life? Not just how does it affect they're probably dying as a kid. So it's not that like, it was our idea that that would be interesting. It's more like with the type of data that people normally use to study this. You cannot do that. Like the way that normally people do it is like they'll ask parents, how many kids have you given birth to how many of them survived die before the certain age, whatever. And so with that data, you can like their kids haven't reached age 60 or 70 yet and you don't know when they're gonna die. You just know that some of them haven't died yet or they have died. So without like, kind of historical data where you can actually track people for like 100 years or something. You just can't do that. So because I mean, in some ways, like another way to ask that question, I think is like, what's novel about this paper? Like, we're not the first paper to look at the health effects of peasant marriage. There's actually like, probably hundreds of papers on that. But ours is the first paper that like looks at the effects throughout the lifetime. which contribute.
And then the paper also talks about like the underestimations because of infant death, so I know that you guys also do or you have a paper on measurement error in US census data, was there anything like related to that that played a role in these papers results seeing that the like, methodology is so heavily tied to using census data?
So I guess you probably read the first first version where we had that the main outcome was the unconditional lifespan and our condition on surviving to certain age. And we did a lot of things. So yes, the measurement error paper like projects that we had together, was more on the US federal census. And for this for this project and measurement errors was actually coming from the genealogical datasets from this website, called FamilySearch.org And they're the problem was that this is just entirely crowd sourced data sets where people just go go into the website, load their profile, and then record their calls. The lifespan or your data or things like that. So you would think that you know, the re there may be some measurement out there. But But, but I guess, related to the infant that infant that if you give birth to some children, and they are they are dead. If you're not parents to this dead, dead children, you will many not many people will know that there was the same content that they were allowed. There must have been a lot of infant deaths that were not reported. Even by their by the descendants of their parents. So, you know, that's, that's something that we cannot really address in any way. So yeah, we tried our best like, you know, we made some assumptions about I can't remember. But probably like the independence Yeah. But anyway, we try to make reasonable assumptions to to, to sort of simulate how a larger bias would be to this omitted and it turned out that it is actually on reporting debts. If we take that into account and other reasonable assumption, it is actually in our in our favor the exact opposite way. Exactly.
We weren't so concerned about but in the in our revision, we actually that's not our main outcome, because they didn't want was also worried about the one this issue. So we actually focus on the effectiveness of marriage on children's lifespan. conditional on them surviving to now
okay, and then, sometimes, like people go into research with anticipated results, so I guess I'm wondering from both of yours, like, extensive experience in the field was sort of that like, the three years that you both found, was that something that you guys were anticipating or was that like, largely unexpected?
Actually, like really in our first paper, economic consequences? Yeah, we kind of say that we think the genetic effects on health because of marriage are not very big. Because it was because in some way, like, that's what most of the literature says that there is some effect, but it's like quite small. And one big problem with that literature that it's not causal, like in economics, we really obsess over trying to identify causal effects. So it's like not just a correlation, but like, you know, that A causes B. And, you know, it seems obvious that like, marry their cousins might also be people who, maybe they're poor, or maybe they live in more remote communities, maybe they have fewer options of who they can marry or whatever. And so maybe their kids do less well or have more health issues, not because they marry their cousin, but just because they come from a poor community, or they have worse health before marriage. And so I like at least my prior coming into this health paper is that like, what we would find is that when you just look at the correlation like you look at like, how long your kids leave, if you marry because and how long someone has kids lives if they don't marry their cousin, if you just compare those two groups that there would be like a difference, like people who marry the cousin have kids who live less long. But then once you once you like control for the, for the causal problem, like you get rid of selection bias or economics or economics that that then the effect will go close to zero. But we didn't find that until we found that like the effect was bigger than people thought it was and that really strong address causality. So like salts, and that was also surprising that like, we also find these big health effects in adulthood, which is something that people hadn't looked at before. So that was kind of the big pitch is like that, you know, to do the causal thing, what we do is we compare people to their siblings. So like, if I marry a cousin, but my brother doesn't, then we look at like, the lives of our children. So you're comparing two parents who have like very similar genetics, similar background, similar income born the similar time, same family structure, whatever, but one of them Yeah, years ago, someone doesn't matter. We find that the kids are the one where the cousin, they just have a higher mortality throughout their life. So like, even at age 30, at age 40, to 50 or 60. They're always like more likely to die.
And then final question for you about is more of like an open ended question that maybe if it doesn't have to do with this paper than it doesn't, but what do you each of you enjoy the most about the work that you do, or the research that you conduct?
Hard to answer during final season
even like the research or my profession, or Sure, yeah, the
research is or anything about it that like, like exciting. World.
It's so fun to just like, think of a questions you find are interesting. You get to like if you're curious about something you can like delving in economics. It's amazing is that we have we're not like stuck in one small thing, but you always have to do research on the same thing. Like we can easily kind of pick topics that we find interesting and move on to those methods, that kind of sense and so, like, something seems interesting, you just like, throw yourself into it, learn about it, get some data, figure it out, and we're like Sam is like amazing at this. Like you're always like looking for new datasets and finding new questions you can answer. Like it's like, yeah.
Well, I think I was telling you I was telling my dad about this. This helped paper and somewhat some follow papers that we're also thinking about. I was telling him that that nobody in the history of the world actually looked at this problem in a way that we were looking at it and the results that we got, it's like nobody has actually came up with this conclusion. So I think the process of research can sometimes be very grinding, coding and errors and fixing errors. harsh comments by the referee is like that. But in the end, I think the thought of actually creating a knowledge that wasn't that didn't exist. before we did anything in this project. I think that's, to me, that's sort of what my legacy, my legacy was, oh, I have done something in my life. That was worth I mean, that was valuable. That really contributed to the stock of knowledge. Maybe that's this just too much. It's National knowledge. Yeah, yeah. Even a very small contribution to work with people or people. No. I think that's sort of the big driver. For me when we're doing research, so that's yeah, that's why I really want to push pushing the frontier pushing the boundaries of knowledge that's, that's important.
Yeah, I agree. I think especially what you were talking about, about the vastness of like economic disciplines is that I found it really interesting when I look into like my econ profs, or like the actual research that they do outside of like the basic like, micro economics that they might teach us that it's like always so varied, even within like developmental economics, and then I also like glanced over your paper on top floor. Discounts. Which I thought was really neat because this is so unrelated, but like in West found are these really expensive apartments and like, because some of them are built right on top of like this burls restaurant in the summer, it gets so hot that a lot of those are actually being sold and you wouldn't expect that because there's these like modern, incredibly well built architecture pieces, but it's interesting. Yeah, that's what I thought about when I was looking into your research. Yeah. Um, that was all for the both of you unless you guys had any other like questions or clarifications I need for my part. Okay, great.
