Although Nigeria’s Benin region was a major rubber producer in 1960, the industry faltered before 1921. I use labour scarcity and state capacity to explain why rubber did not take hold in this period. The government was unable to protect Benin’s rubber forests from...

At the start of the Second World War, British policies restricted rubber planting in Nigeria’s Benin region. After Japan occupied Southeast Asia, Britain encouraged maximum production of rubber in Benin. Late in the war, officials struggled with the planting boom that had occurred. The...

Suppression of the slave trade after 1807 increased the incidence of conflict between Africans.  We use geo-coded data on African conflicts to uncover a discontiuous increase in conflict after 1807 in areas affected by the slave trade.  In West Africa, the slave trade declined.  This...

We show that the long-run consequences of historical warfare are different for Sub-Saharan Africa than for the rest of the Old World.  We identify the locations of over 1,750 conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe from 1400 to 1799.  We find that historical warfare predicts greater state...

We study the origins of adult mental health using early life income fluctuations.  Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we show that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early life decreases the...

We show that rainfall, temperature, and commodity price shocks predict unrest in colonial French West Africa between 1906 and 1956.  We use a simple model of taxation and anti-tax resistance to explain these results.  In the colonial period, the response of unrest to economic shocks was...

Oil prices experienced in early life predict differential adult outcomes across Nigerian ethnic groups.  Our difference-in-difference approach compares members of southern ethnicities to other Nigerians from the same birth cohort.  Greater prices in a southern individual's birth year predict...

We examine the determinants of time allocation and child labour in a year-long panel of time-use data from colonial Nigeria.  Using quantitative and ethnographic approaches, we show that health shocks imposed time costs on individuals.  Whether individuals could recruit substitutes depended on...

We consider an observer who makes a finite number of observations of an industry producing a homogeneous good, where each observation consists of the market price and firm specific production quantities.  We develop a revealed preference test (in the form of a linear program) for the hypothesis...

The conventional view is that an increase in the value of a natural resource can lead to private property over it.  Many Igbo groups in Nigeria, however, curtailed private rights over palm trees in response to the palm produce trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  I present a...