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 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 paper integrates the analysis of price volatility and supply instability for a commodity exporting country, adding consideration of the role of the non-tradable sector to the literature. The non-tradable sector plays a potentially significant role in changing the economy`s response to...

In a monetary policy model incorporating partial persistence in inflation it is shown that inflation bias is reduced and the response to shocks improved if the policy maker has a discount rate lower than its true social value. Thus a patient central banker is shown to be a third mechanism for...

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...

Motivated by a simple model, I use DHS data to test nine hypotheses about the prevalence and decline of African polygamy.  First, greater female involvement in agriculture does not increase polygamy.  Second, past inequality better predicts polygamy today than does current inequality.  Third,...

We test whether early-life war exposure influences later-life political engagement in Africa.  We combine data on the location and intensity of conflicts since 1954 with nationally representative data on political attitudes and behaviors from 17 sub-Saharan African countries.  Exposure from...

We show that psychological well-being in adulthood varies substantially with circumstance in early life.  Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we find that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early...