levels above those of the non-Native population and twice the years of education than those of the group with the lowest educational attainment. Considering all outcomes, the group with the best outcomes has an average standardized outcome almost 9 percent of a standard deviation higher than the general population, while the group with the worst outcomes has an average outcome that is lower than the general population by 60 percent of a standard deviation. These large differences in outcomes across native groups stress the importance of not considering the native population of Argentina as homogeneous.

While there may be many possible determinants of the differences across groups, we show that there is one historical characteristic of these that correlates with their groups outcomes: groups that practiced agriculture before the arrival of the Spanish tend to have better outcomes today than those that were hunter gatherers. This is consistent with what was found for Sub-Saharan Africa by Michalopoulos et al. (2018).

# **2 Size and Distribution of Native Groups**

The main data used in this study come from the 2010 National Census collected by the National Institute of Statistics (Instituto Nacional de Estad ́ıstica y Censos, 2010). In particular, we use data collected with the “long-form” version of the census based on a probabilistic sample of households. In addition to the questions on the short form (regarding gender, age, level of education, dwellings’ characteristics, employment status, etc.), the long-form questionnaire includes questions on fertility, contributions to retirement plans, health insurance and whether the respondent is Afro-descendant or belongs to or is descendant from an indigenous or Native group (Instituto Nacional de Estad ́ıstica y Censos, 2010). The 2010 National Census is the first decennial census in Argentina to ask about racial or ethnic identification at the individual level which allowed for a description of the native population (Instituto Nacional de Estad ́ıstica y Censos, 2015a,b,c,d,e,f).<sup>34</sup> Table 1 shows the population of each of the 32 native groups described in the 2010 census. The largest group is the Mapuche with more than 200,000 people, and the smallest one is the Tapiete with 407 people. Almost a million people self-identify as Native

> 3 In 1869, the first national census estimated the indigenous population based on reports from local chiefs and they were not considered Argentines. In the national censuses of 1895 and 1914, the population was also estimated. The 2001 census asked if one of the members of the household self-identified or belonged to a native group but did not identify this member individually. In total 281,959 households were identified with at least one indigenous person. A sample of individuals in these households was surveyed by the National Institute of Statistics in 2004 and 2005. We study the data from the 2010 census as it allows for a cleaner comparison as all individuals were surveyed on the same day.

> 4 In Appendix A, we have included a screenshot of the questionnaire form from the 2010 National Census, showing the section in which the questions to identify Native and Afro-Argentine groups were included (Figure A1).

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