Nathan Nunn

In a landmark 2008 paper in the American Economic Review, Nunn demonstrated that African regions from which the most people were taken during the transatlantic and other slave trades remain the poorest today. He constructed detailed shipping and ethnographic datasets to measure these persistent effects across centuries.

Nunn is a professor of economics at Harvard University, where he holds a named chair. He previously served on the faculty at the University of British Columbia before joining Harvard.

Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon published research showing that areas of Africa with higher historical slave extraction exhibit lower levels of interpersonal trust today, demonstrating that traumatic historical institutions can shape cultural norms centuries later. This work helped establish the field of cultural economics as a serious empirical discipline.

Nunn digitized and mapped data on the ethnic origins of enslaved Africans using historical shipping manifests combined with ethnographic information on pre-colonial African societies from sources such as the Ethnographic Atlas compiled by anthropologist George Murdock. These datasets have been used extensively by other researchers studying African development and economic history.