The con‡ict in Darfur has been described both as an ethnic cleansing campaign, carried out by the Sudanese government and its allied militias, and as a local struggle over dwindling natural resources between African farmers and Arab herders. In this paper, we construct a theoretical framework...

Land tenure security has long been touted as key to increased performance of the agricultural sector in developing countries. This paper utilizes household level panel data to analyse the impact of a land certification program on farmers� off-farm participation and activity choices in the...

This paper investigates returns to capital in the formal and informal sectors in Ethiopia using parametric and semi-parametric regression techniques. Results show that there is a higher annual median return to capital in the informal sector (52–140%) than the formal sector (15–21%). However,...

We use census panel data on Ethiopian manufacturing firms to analyze the connections between enterprise agglomeration, firm-level output prices and physical productivity. We find a negative and statistically significant relationship between the agglomerat

In this study, we investigate the relationship between exporting and firm performance using a longer panel dataset of Ethiopian manufacturing firms for the period 1996?2009. We test two hypotheses regarding exporting: selection into exporting versus learn

In this comment on AJR (2001), we argue that a bundling of all former colonies into one ‘colonial’ theory of comparative development is problematic for several reasons. During the mercantilist wave of mainly Latin American colonization between 1500-1830, strong capitalist institutions were...

Is social capital always important for economic growth? A number of recent micro studies suggest that interpersonal trust and social capital will have its greatest impact on economic performance when court institutions are relatively weak. The conventional wisdom from macro studies, however, is...

The article analyzes the war against Mobutu (1996-97) and the more recent war (1998-) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with particular attention to greed and grievance as motivating factors in these two wars. Whereas the authors’ usage of the term ‘greed’ simply...

All since the rise of the first civilizations, economic development has been closely intertwined with the evolution of states. In this paper, we contribute to the literature on state history and long-run economic development in four ways. First, we extend and complete the state history index...