Time Use and Gender in Africa in Times of Structural Transformation

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Taryn Dinkelman and L. Rachel Ngai

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Many African countries are still in the early stages of structural transformation. Typically, as economies move through the structural transformation, activities once conducted within the household are outsourced to the market. This has particular impli...

Young Adults and Labor Markets in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Oriana Bandiera, Ahmed Elsayed, Andrea Smurra, and Céline Zipfel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Every year, millions of young adults join the labor market in Africa. This paper harmonizes surveys and censuses from 68 low- and middle-income countries to compare their job prospects to those of their counterparts in other low-income regions. We show th...

Political Distortions, State Capture, and Economic Development in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Nathan Canen and Leonard Wantchekon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

This article studies the role of political distortions in driving economic growth and development in Africa. We first discuss how existing theories based on long-run structural factors (e.g., pre-colonial and colonial institutions, or ethnic diversity) ma...

Policy Watch: Debt Relief

By Serkan Arslanalp and Peter Blair Henry

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2006

At the Gleneagles summit in July 2005, the heads of state from the G-8 countries—the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom—called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the African De...

On the Impact of Federal Housing Policies on Racial Inequality

By Omer Ali

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Using data on the value of Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance between 1935 and 1939, I estimate the effect of the agency's program on racial disparities in home ownership and home values. The distance between an FHA office and countie...

States and Power in Africa by Jeffrey I. Herbst: A Review Essay

By James A. Robinson

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2002

Herbst argues that Africa is plagued by "state failure" to provide certain public goods in society, such as law and order, defense, contract enforcement, and infrastructure. Herbst has provided a bold, historically informed theoretical analysis, essential...

More than Shelter: The Effect of Rental Eviction Moratoria on Household Well-Being

By Xudong An, Stuart A. Gabriel, and Nitzan Tzur-Ilan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We investigate the impact of the 2020 COVID-19 rental eviction moratoria on household well-being. Analysis of new panel data indicates that eviction moratoria reduced evictions and resulted in redirection of scarce household financial resources to immedia...

Simplicity and Probability Weighting in Choice under Risk

By Drew Fudenberg and Indira Puri

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We present a speculative application of model estimates from Fudenberg and Puri (2021) to prize-linked savings in South Africa. The models used include one combining simplicity theory (Puri 2018, 2022), a preference for lotteries with fewer possible outco...

Integration Costs and Missing Women in Firms around the World

By Conrad Miller, Jennifer Peck, and Mehmet Seflek

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Where social norms favor gender segregation, firms may find it costly to employ both men and women. If the costs of integration are largely fixed, firms will integrate only if their expected number of female employees under integration exceeds some thresh...

Anatomy of The Anatomy of Racial Inequality

By Steven Raphael

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2002

In this review, I summarize and offer thoughts about two arguments key to Glenn Loury's analysis of the anatomy of racial inequality. The first concerns the idea that many negative stereotypes held about blacks in the United States are self-fulfilling, de...

A Nation of Laws, and Race Laws

By Nina Banks and Warren C. Whatley

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2022

This article reviews the history of race laws in the United States as distinct from the rule of law, an idea found in the writing and speeches of Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander, the first African American PhD in economics (1921). We review the race laws o...

African American Intergenerational Economic Mobility since 1880

By William J. Collins and Marianne H. Wanamaker

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We document the intergenerational mobility of Black and White American men from 1880 through 2000 by building new historical datasets for the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and combining them with modern data to cover the middle and late twen...

The Side Effects of Immunity: Malaria and African Slavery in the United States

By Elena Esposito

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

This paper documents the role of malaria in the diffusion of African slavery in the United States. The novel empirical evidence reveals that the introduction of malaria triggered a demand for malaria-resistant labor, which led to a massive expansion of Af...

Job Search and Hiring with Limited Information about Workseekers' Skills

By Eliana Carranza, Robert Garlick, Kate Orkin, and Neil Rankin

American Economic Review, November 2022

We assess South African workseekers' skills and disseminate the assessment results to explore how limited information affects firm and workseeker behavior. Giving workseekers assessment results that they can credibly share with firms increases workseekers...

The Old-Age Security Motive for Fertility: Evidence from the Extension of Social Pensions in Namibia

By Pauline Rossi and Mathilde Godard

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2022

The old-age security motive for fertility postulates that people's needs for old-age support raise the demand for children. We exploit the extension of social pensions in Namibia during the 1990s to provide a quasi-experimental quantification of this wide...

Sadie T. M. Alexander: Black Women and a "Taste of Freedom in the Economic World"

By Nina Banks

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

The employment history of African American women is notable because of their higher labor force participation rates compared to other women in the US. This essay discusses Sadie T. M. Alexander's analysis of Black women and work based on her 1930s speec...

Interaction, Stereotypes, and Performance: Evidence from South Africa

By Lucia Corno, Eliana La Ferrara, and Justine Burns

American Economic Review, December 2022

We exploit a policy designed to randomly allocate roommates in a large South African university to investigate whether interracial interaction affects stereotypes, attitudes and performance. Using implicit association tests, we find that living with a roo...

On The Politics of Property Rights by Haber, Razo, and Maurer

By Robert H. Bates

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2004

Stephen Haber et al. explore economic growth in key sectors of the Mexican economy, 1876-1929, an era of political instability and (1914-17) civil war. The authors demonstrate that economic growth continued amidst political instability and offer an explan...

Reconciliation Narratives: The Birth of a Nation after the US Civil War

By Elena Esposito, Tiziano Rotesi, Alessandro Saia, and Mathias Thoenig

American Economic Review, June 2023

We study how the spread of the Lost Cause narrative—a revisionist and racist retelling of the US Civil War—shifted opinions and behaviors toward national reunification and racial discrimination against African Americans. Looking at screenings of T...