Showing 1 - 10 of 148
We estimate how random weather fluctuations affected infant mortality across 28 African countries in the past, combining high-resolution data from retrospective fertility surveys (DHS) and climate-model reanalysis (ERA-40). We find that infants were much more likely to die when exposed in utero...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011083660
Much African land currently has low productivity and has attracted investors purchasing (or leasing) land as a speculative option on higher future prices or productivity. If land deals are to be beneficial they need to induce productivity enhancing investments. Some of these will be publicly...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009367429
To what extent has Sub-Saharan Africa’s slow economic growth over the past five decades been due to price and trade policies that have discouraged production of agricultural relative to non-agricultural tradables? This paper uses a new set of estimates of policy distortions to relative prices...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009246604
. This paper argues that family labour supply interactions and cross-country heterogeneity in family culture are key for … shaped by national features. We also document that cross-country differences in family culture cause cross …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005124400
This paper analyzes how private decisions and public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences (values), material or other explicit incentives (laws) and social sanctions or rewards (norms). It first examines how honor, stigma and social norms arise from individuals’ behaviors...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009371470
We study how the prevailing internal organization of the family affected the initial design of pension systems. Our theoretical framework predicts that, in society with weak family ties, pensions systems were introduced to act as a safety net, while in societies with strong ties they replicate...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009399717
This paper provides instrumental variables estimates of the response of aggregate private consumption to transitory output shocks in poor countries. To identify exogenous, unanticipated, idiosyncratic and transitory variations in national output we use year-to-year variations in rainfall as an...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011083244
Ethnic favoritism is seen as antithetical to development. This paper provides credible quantification of the extent of ethnic favoritism using data on road building in Kenyan districts across the 1963-2011 period. Guided by a model it then examines whether the transition in and out of democracy...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011083459
We study the effect of civil conflict on social capital, focusing on the experience of Uganda during the last decade. Using individual and county-level data, we document large causal effects on trust and ethnic identity of an exogenous outburst of ethnic conflicts in 2002-05. We exploit two...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011083530
There is a great deal of interest in the causes and consequences of conflict in Africa, one of the poorest areas of the world where only modest economic progess has been made. This paper asks whether post-colonial conflict is, at least in part, a legacy of historical conflict by examining the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011083742