Total fertility rates in Sub-Saharan Africa are nearly double that of any other region in the world. Evidence is mixed on whether providing contraceptives has an impact on fertility. I exploit exogenous, intermittent reductions in contraceptive supply in Ghana, resulting from cuts in U.S....

As by product of economic growth, jobs are indeed transformational. In other words, efficiency increases as workers get better at what they do (as more productive jobs appear and less productive one disappear). In fact societies flourish as jobs bring together people from different ethnic and...

African societies exported more slaves in colder years. Lower temperatures reduced mortality and raised agricultural yields, lowering slave supply costs. Our results help explain African participation in the slave trade, which predicts adverse outcomes today. We use an annual panel of African...

Economic theory traditionally suggests that monetary policy can influence the business cycle, but not the long-run potential output. Despite well documented theoretical and empirical consensus on money neutrality in the literature, the role of money as an informational variable for monetary...

This study estimates liquidity premiums using the recently developed Liu (2006) measure within a multifactor capital asset pricing model (CAPM) including size premiums and a time varying parameter model for the West African emerging market of Nigeria. The evidence suggests that liquidity factors...

The issue of whether faith-inspired providers are able to reach the poor depends in part on the cost of the health services provided. This paper relies on recent nationally representative household surveys for sub-Saharan African countries to assess to what extent the cost of healthcare is a...

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis asserts that pollution levels rises as a country develops, but reaches a certain threshold where pollution begins to fall with increasing income. In EKC analysis, the relationship between environmental degradation and income is usually expressed...

This paper examines how Africa’s share in the contribution to global scientific knowledge can be boosted with existing Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) mechanisms. The findings which broadly indicate that tight IPRs are correlated with knowledge contribution can be summarized in two main...

Purpose: We make available new critical macroeconomic financial indicators to the research community. Nothing is more powerful than a phenomenon whose time has come. What is the macroeconomic empirical context of growing mobile banking? Perhaps one of the deepest empirical hollows in the...

Ghana has the lowest under-five mortality rate in West Africa. Understanding why Ghana’s child mortality rate is lower than in neighboring countries may offer useful insights for other developing countries that are trying to improve child health. This paper explores whether Ghana’s lower...