While a mega-event is scheduled at least once every year somewhere in the world, these events are rare occurrences for the host cities and countries. The benefits of such events seem lucrative; the very fact that many countries bid to host these events suggests that the benefits - be they...

Using a standard panel gravity equation of 175 origin/destination countries between 1995 and 2008, 37 of which are African, we identify the factors that drive African-inbound (arrivals to Africa from other continents) and within-African tourism (arrivals from and to an African country). We find...

Religious beliefs influence many aspects of peoples’ daily lives, so it is plausible to argue that religion affects some of humanity’s most central endeavors, such as trade, migration, foreign investment and tourism. This paper investigates the role a country’s religious affiliation plays...

The lack of accurate measures of human capital formation often constrain investigations into the long-run determinants of growth and comparative economic development, especially in regions such as Africa. Using the reported age of criminals in the Courts of Justice records in the Cape Archive,...

To estimate the long-term, persistent effects of missionary education requires two strong assumptions: that mission station settlement is uncorrelated with other economic variables, such as soil quality and access to markets, and 2) that selection into (and out of) mission stations is...

This paper investigates the causes and consequences of colonial Africa’s first financial crash, which happened in South Africa’s Dutch Cape Colony. The 1788–1793 crisis followed a common sequence of events: trade and fiscal deficits were monetized by printing money, credit...

This paper highlights an aspect of mega-events that has been neglected: the changing composition of tourist arrivals during and after theevent. The change happens because, in the FIFA World Cup, a quota of countries participates from each continent and this opens up new tourismmarkets. We show...

The stylized view of the Dutch Cape Colony (1652-1795) is of a poor, subsistence economy, with little progress in the first 143 years of Dutch rule. New evidence from probate inventory and auction roll records show that previous estimates about wealth at the Cape are inaccurate. In contrast to...

Because information about the livelihoods of indigenous groups is often missing from colonial records, their presence usually escapes attention in quantitative estimates of colonial economic activity. This is nowhere more apparent than in the eighteenth-century Dutch Cape Colony, where the role...

Accurate measures of education quality — primarily, years of schooling or literacy rates — are widely used to ascertain the contribution of human capital formation on long-run economic growth and development. This paper, using a census of 4500 missionary station residents in 1849...