What are the long run consequences of planning and providing basic infrastructure in neighborhoods, where people build their own homes? We study “Sites and Services” projects implemented in seven Tanzanian cities during the 1970s and 1980s, half of which provided infrastructure in previously...

Although Africa has experienced rapid urbanization in recent decades, we know little about the process of urbanization across the continent. The paper exploits a natural experiment, the abolition of South African pass laws, to explore how exogenous population shocks affect the spatial...

History offers many examples of dictators who worsened their behavior significantly over time (like Zimbabwe's Mugabe) as well as dictators who displayed remarkable improvements (like Rawlings of Ghana). The authors show that such mutations can result from rational behavior when the dictator's...

History offers many examples of dictators who worsened their behavior significantly over time (like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe), while there are also cases of dictators who have displayed remarkable improvements (like Jerry Rawlings of Ghana). We show that such mutations can result from rational...