Across African countries, prevention policies are unrelated to the prevalence of HIV/AIDS and, even in countries in which they were successful, these policies are often unstable or reversed. To explain these two puzzles, we propose a simple political economy model that examines how prevention...

This paper studies the role of ethno-linguistic diversity on risky sexual behavior and HIV status of individuals. We compute three different measures of ethno-linguistic heterogeneity and show that ethno-linguistic heterogeneity is positively related to risky sexual behavior and HIV status of...

The HIV/AIDS epidemic has dramatically altered patterns of morbidity and mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa with potential consequences on fertility and population dynamics. We take advantage of a unique data-set collected in Cameroon among HIV positive patients and estimate the relationship...

Across African countries, prevention policies are unrelated to the prevalence of HIV/AIDS and, even in countries in which they were successful, these policies are often unstable or reversed. To explain these two puzzles, we propose a simple political economy model that examines how prevention...

We present a simple political economy model that explains two major puzzles of government policies to combat HIV/AIDS epidemic: the lack of policy response in many countries where the epidemic is massive and the reversal of the downward trend in HIV prevalence in the countries that have adopted...