High Trade Costs and Their Consequences: An Estimated Dynamic Model of African Agricultural Storage and Trade

By Obie Porteous

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Using a new intranational dataset of monthly grain prices and production and a new approach to identify cost parameters, I estimate and solve a dynamic model of agricultural storage and trade covering all 42 countries of continental sub-Saharan Africa. I ...

Does Diversity Matter for Health? Experimental Evidence from Oakland

By Marcella Alsan, Owen Garrick, and Grant Graziani

American Economic Review, December 2019

We study the effect of physician workforce diversity on the demand for preventive care among African American men. In an experiment in Oakland, California, we randomize black men to black or non-black male medical doctors. We use a two-stage design, measu...

Women's Empowerment in Action: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in Africa

By Oriana Bandiera, Niklas Buehren, Robin Burgess, Markus Goldstein, Selim Gulesci, Imran Rasul, and Munshi Sulaiman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2020

We evaluate a multifaceted policy intervention attempting to jump-start adolescent women's empowerment in Uganda by simultaneously providing them vocational training and information on sex, reproduction, and marriage. We find that four years postintervent...

Historical Legacies and African Development

By Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2020

As Africa's role on the global stage is rising, so does the need to understand the shadow of history on the continent's economy and polity. We discuss recent works that shed light on Africa's colonial and precolonial legacies. The emerging corpus is rem...

Charging Ahead: Prepaid Metering, Electricity Use, and Utility Revenue

By Kelsey Jack and Grant Smith

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2020

Monthly bills for services such as electricity often go unpaid in developing countries. Prepaid meters offer a potential technological solution. In Cape Town, South Africa, over 4,000 residential customers on monthly billing were switched to prepaid meter...

Building Nations through Shared Experiences: Evidence from African Football

By Emilio Depetris-Chauvin, Ruben Durante, and Filipe Campante

American Economic Review, May 2020

We examine whether shared collective experiences help build a national identity, by looking at the impact of national football teams' victories in sub-Saharan Africa. We find that individuals surveyed in the days after an important victory of their countr...

Community-Based Crisis Response: Evidence from Sierra Leone's Ebola Outbreak

By Darin Christensen, Oeindrila Dube, Johannes Haushofer, Bilal Siddiqi, and Maarten Voors

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Postmortems on the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa suggest that effective community engagement helped slow transmission by encouraging people to come forward and be tested. We evaluate the impact of Community Care Centers: a new crisis response model...

Migration, Money Transfers, and Mobile Money: Evidence from Niger

By Jenny C. Aker, Silvia Prina, and C. Jamilah Welch

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Mobile money can reduce the cost of sending remittances as compared with traditional money transfer systems. Despite remittances being a crucial part of the West African economy, mobile money is failing to take off. We use supply and demand data for money...

Adopting Mobile Money: Evidence from an Experiment in Rural Africa

By Catia Batista and Pedro C. Vicente

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Who uses mobile money, and what do people do with it? This paper describes mobile money adoption patterns following the experimental introduction of mobile money for the first time in rural areas of Southern Mozambique. We use administrative and household...

The Value of Reference Letters: Experimental Evidence from South Africa

By Martin Abel, Rulof Burger, and Patrizio Piraino

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2020

We show that reference letters from former employers alleviate information frictions in a low-skill labor market, improving applicant screening and gender equity. A resume audit study finds that using a reference letter in the application increases callba...

Competition and Entry in Agricultural Markets: Experimental Evidence from Kenya

By Lauren Falcao Bergquist and Michael Dinerstein

American Economic Review, December 2020

African agricultural markets are characterized by low farmer revenues and high consumer food prices. Many have worried that this wedge is partially driven by imperfect competition among intermediaries. This paper provides experimental evidence from Kenya ...

Subsidies and the African Green Revolution: Direct Effects and Social Network Spillovers of Randomized Input Subsidies in Mozambique

By Michael Carter, Rachid Laajaj, and Dean Yang

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2021

The Green Revolution, which bolstered agricultural yields and economic well-being in Asia and Latin America beginning in the 1960s, largely bypassed sub-Saharan Africa. We study the first randomized controlled trial of a government-implemented input subsi...

The Legacy of Colonial Medicine in Central Africa

By Sara Lowes and Eduardo Montero

American Economic Review, April 2021

Between 1921 and 1956, French colonial governments organized medical campaigns to treat and prevent sleeping sickness. Villagers were forcibly examined and injected with medications with severe, sometimes fatal, side effects. We digitized 30 years of arch...

Development, Growth and Policy Reform in the Middle East and North Africa since 1950

[Symposium: Middle East]

By Tarik M. Yousef

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

The September 11 terrorist attacks ignited global interest in the Middle East. Observers in the region and abroad were quick to highlight the development "deficits" in Middle Eastern countries which have been linked to everything from structural economic ...

Investor Herding and Spillovers in African Debt Markets

By Hanan Morsy, Eman Moustafa, Tiguene Nabassaga, and Mustafa Yenice

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Using high-frequency data for sovereign long-term bond yields and five-year credit default swap spreads, we estimate a regression model to identify a nonlinear link between cross-section deviation of market yield and extreme movements in African markets a...

Migration Networks and Location Decisions: Evidence from US Mass Migration

By Bryan A. Stuart and Evan J. Taylor

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2021

This paper studies how birth town migration networks affected long-run location decisions during historical US migration episodes. We develop a new method to estimate the strength of migration networks for each receiving and sending location. Our estimate...

Washington Consensus Reforms and Lessons for Economic Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa

[Symposium: Washington Consensus Revisited]

By Belinda Archibong, Brahima Coulibaly, and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2021

Over three decades after market-oriented structural reforms termed "Washington Consensus" policies were first implemented, we revisit the evidence on policy adoption and the effects of these policies on socio-economic performance in sub-Saharan African ...

Teaching Labor Laws: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in South Africa

By Marianne Bertrand and Bruno Crépon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

We assess whether imperfect knowledge of labor regulation hinders job creation at small and medium-sized firms. We partner with a labor law expert organization that provides information about labor regulation via newsletters and access to a specialized we...

Labor Productivity Growth and Industrialization in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Margaret McMillan and Albert Zeufack

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Manufacturing has made an important contribution to raising living standards in many parts of the world. Concerns about premature deindustrialization have made some observers skeptical about the potential for manufacturing to play this role in Africa. B...

Agricultural Technology in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Tavneet Suri and Christopher Udry

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

We discuss recent trends in agricultural productivity in Africa and highlight how technological progress in agriculture has stagnated on the continent. We briefly review the literature that tries to explain this stagnation through the lens of particular c...