Jean E. Ensminger
Edie and Lew Wasserman Professor of Anthropology
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Office: 202 Baxter Hall Email: jensming@hss.caltech.edu Tel: 626-395-4541 |
Mailing Address: California Institute of Technology Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences MC 228-77 Pasadena, CA 91125 |
Research interests
New Institutional Economics, Rational Choice Theory, Experimental Economics, Economic Anthropology, economic development
Research Statement
I have spent my entire career attempting to understand the economies of Africa and explaining poverty and the lack of development in the less developed world. Most of my research has approached these issues from the bottom up vantage point of the same community in rural Kenya. This research has been informed by theoretical developments in political economy--from rational choice theory to the new institutional economics. The underlying thread is the strong connection between institutions (including those of government) and economic performance.
For over twenty-five years I have been studying the household economics of the Orma in eastern Kenya. This has involved recurrent panel data collection of socio-economic data (including by not limited to: age, gender, education, genealogies, income, wealth, employment, and migration), and more recently experimental economics and social network analysis. These quantitative methods are supplemented by more qualitative techniques such as participant observation and informal interviewing during many years of village residence.
In recent years I have been involved in a large-scale collaboration in experimental economics to investigate the relationship between formal institutions and pro-social behavior around the world. We have been running ultimatum, dictator, trust, public goods, and third party punishment games under controlled conditions. The field sites represented in this project span the extant continuum of human evolution including hunting and gathering, slash and burn horticulture, nomadic herders, cash crop farmers, and small town and urban Missouri. To date this research has pointed to a counter-intuitive finding that the more complex the society and the more integrated into the world market economy, the more pro-social (fair-minded and cooperative) the behavior.
Part of my broader interest in social norms involves an investigation of the process by which norms change over time. We know that many societies get stuck in what many of us would deem bad equilibria, for example: malevolent dictatorship, corruption, slavery, female circumcision, and theories of disease causation and crop failure based upon witchcraft. What we do not yet understand well is the processes by which societies extract themselves from sub-optimal belief systems and behaviors. Through the simultaneous observation of changing behavior among the Orma, and a vast array of quantitative data on the same individuals, I hope to make some progress in specifying the mechanisms through which such norms change over time, paying particular attention to the economic causes and consequences of such change.
My current and future research also involves an examination of corruption and development in rural Africa. The goal is to find a better model of project delivery than that currently in vogue; one that minimizes losses in public goods provision from corruption.
Publications
Making a Market: The Institutional Transformation of an African Society. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
"Transaction Costs and Islam: Explaining Conversion in Africa." Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 152(1):4-29, 1997.
"Changing Social Norms: Common Property, Bridewealth, and Clan Exogamy" (with Jack Knight). Current Anthropology 38(1)1-24, 1997.
"Changing Property Rights: Reconciling Formal and Informal Rights to Land in Africa." In The Frontiers of the New Institutional Economics, John N. Drobak and John V.C. Nye, eds. Pp. 165-198. New York, New York: Academic Press, 1997.
"Experimental Economics in the Bush: How Institutions Matter." In Institutions and Organizations, Claude Menard, ed. London: Edward Elgar, 2000.
"Reputations, Trust, and the Principal-Agent Problem." In Trust and Society. Karen Cook, ed. New York, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001.