Race and College Success: Evidence from Missouri

By Peter Arcidiacono and Cory Koedel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2014

Conditional on enrollment, African American students are substantially less likely to graduate from four-year public universities than white students. Using administrative micro-data from Missouri, we decompose the graduation gap into racial differences i...

Child-Adoption Matching: Preferences for Gender and Race

By Mariagiovanna Baccara, Allan Collard-Wexler, Leonardo Felli, and Leeat Yariv

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2014

This paper uses a new dataset on child-adoption matching to estimate the preferences of potential adoptive parents over US-born and unborn children relinquished for adoption. We identify significant preferences favoring girls and against African American ...

Does Abolishing User Fees Lead to Improved Health Status? Evidence from Post-apartheid South Africa

By Shinsuke Tanaka

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

Whether user fees for health services should be charged or abolished for the poor has recently been debated. This study examines the impact on child health status of removing user fees in South Africa. Our main innovation is to exploit plausibly exogenous...

The Effect of the TseTse Fly on African Development

By Marcella Alsan

American Economic Review, January 2015

The TseTse fly is unique to Africa and transmits a parasite harmful to humans and lethal to livestock. This paper tests the hypothesis that the TseTse reduced the ability of Africans to generate an agricultural surplus historically. Ethnic groups inhabiti...

The Impact of the Great Migration on Mortality of African Americans: Evidence from the Deep South

By Dan A. Black, Seth G. Sanders, Evan J. Taylor, and Lowell J. Taylor

American Economic Review, February 2015

The Great Migration–the massive migration of African Americans out of the rural South to largely urban locations in the North, Midwest, and West–was a landmark event in US history. Our paper shows that this migration increased mortality of African Ame...

The Rise and Decline of General Laws of Capitalism

[Symposium: Wealth and Inequality]

By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2015

Thomas Piketty's (2013) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue...

Pay as You Go: Prepaid Metering and Electricity Expenditures in South Africa

By B. Kelsey Jack and Grant Smith

American Economic Review, May 2015

High rates of customer default on utility bills present a barrier to the expansion of electricity access in the developing world. Pre-paid electricity metering offers a technological solution to ensuring timely payment. Using an eleven-year panel of pre-p...

Understanding Ethnic Identity in Africa: Evidence from the Implicit Association Test (IAT)

By Sara Lowes, Nathan Nunn, James A. Robinson, and Jonathan Weigel

American Economic Review, May 2015

We use a variant of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to examine individuals' implicit attitudes towards various ethnic groups. Using a population from the Democratic Republic of Congo, we find that the IAT measures show evidence of an implicit bias ...

The Impact of Ethnic Diversity in Bureaucracies: Evidence from the Nigerian Civil Service

By Imran Rasul and Daniel Rogger

American Economic Review, May 2015

We document the correlation between the workplace diversity in bureaucratic organizations and public service delivery. We do so in the context of Nigeria, where ethnicity is a salient form of self-identity. We thus expand the empirical management literatu...

Referrals: Peer Screening and Enforcement in a Consumer Credit Field Experiment

By Gharad Bryan, Dean Karlan, and Jonathan Zinman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2015

Empirical evidence on peer intermediation lags behind both theory and practice in which lenders use peers to mitigate adverse selection and moral hazard. Using a referral incentive under individual liability, we develop a two-stage field experiment that p...

Crossing Party Lines: The Effects of Information on Redistributive Politics

By Katherine Casey

American Economic Review, August 2015

Many lament that weak accountability and poor governance impede economic development in Africa. Politicians rely on ethnic allegiances that deliver the vote irrespective of performance, dampening electoral incentives. Giving voters information about candi...

Mortality Inequality: The Good News from a County-Level Approach

[Symposium: Inequality Beyond Income]

By Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2016

In this essay, we ask whether the distributions of life expectancy and mortality have become generally more unequal, as many seem to believe, and we report some good news. Focusing on groups of counties ranked by their poverty rates, we show that gains in...

Infrastructure, Incentives, and Institutions

By Nava Ashraf, Edward L. Glaeser, and Giacomo A. M. Ponzetto

American Economic Review, May 2016

Expensive infrastructure is ineffective if it doesn't travel the last mile. In nineteenth-century New York and modern Africa, disease has spread when urbanites chose not to use newly built sanitation infrastructure to save money. Either subsidies or Pigou...

Appliance Ownership and Aspirations among Electric Grid and Home Solar Households in Rural Kenya

By Kenneth Lee, Edward Miguel, and Catherine Wolfram

American Economic Review, May 2016

In Sub-Saharan Africa, there are active debates about whether increases in energy access should be driven by investments in electric grid infrastructure or small-scale "home solar" systems (e.g., solar lanterns and solar home systems). We summarize the re...

HIV/AIDS and Development: A Reappraisal of the Productivity and Factor Accumulation Effects

By Théophile T. Azomahou, Raouf Boucekkine, and Bity Diene

American Economic Review, May 2016

We build an economico-epidemiological Solow-Swan model. Mortality and morbidity effects on effective labor are taken into account. A Ben-Porath-like mechanism affects the dynamics of the saving rate and reduces labor productivity. Based on optimal project...

The Long-Term Effects of the Printing Press in Sub-Saharan Africa

By Julia Cagé and Valeria Rueda

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2016

This article investigates the long-term consequences of the printing press in the nineteenth century sub-Saharan Africa on social capital nowadays. Protestant missionaries were the first to import the printing press and to allow the indigenous population ...

The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa

By Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou

American Economic Review, July 2016

We explore the consequences of ethnic partitioning, a neglected aspect of the Scramble for Africa, and uncover the following. First, apart from the land mass and water bodies, split and non-split groups are similar across several dimensions. Second, the i...

Understanding African Poverty over the Longue Durée: A Review of Africa's Development in Historical Perspective

By Margaret McMillan

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2016

The sixteen essays edited and synthesized by Emmanuel Akyeampong, Robert H. Bates, Nathan Nunn, and James A. Robinson contribute significantly to our understanding of the following questions: (1) When did Africa become poor? (2) Why did Africa become poor...

The Long-Run Effects of Labor Migration on Human Capital Formation in Communities of Origin

By Taryn Dinkelman and Martine Mariotti

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2016

We provide new evidence of one channel through which circular labor migration has long-run effects on origin communities: by raising completed human capital of the next generation. We estimate the net effects of migration from Malawi to South African mine...

Corruption, Trade Costs, and Gains from Tariff Liberalization: Evidence from Southern Africa

By Sandra Sequeira

American Economic Review, October 2016

This paper exploits quasi-experimental variation in tariffs in southern Africa to estimate trade elasticities. Traded quantities respond only weakly to a 30 percent reduction in the average nominal tariff rate. Trade flow data combined with primary data o...