Trying to Understand the PPPs in ICP 2011: Why Are the Results So Different?

By Angus Deaton and Bettina Aten

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2017

Purchasing power parity exchange rates, or PPPs, are price indexes that summarize prices in each country relative to a numeraire country, typically the United States. These numbers are used to compare living standards across countries, by academics in stu...

Risky Transportation Choices and the Value of a Statistical Life

By Gianmarco León and Edward Miguel

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2017

This paper exploits an unusual transportation setting to generate some of the first revealed preference value of a statistical life (VSL) estimates from a low-income setting. We estimate the trade-offs individuals are willing to make between mortality ris...

Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2017

In an experiment on Airbnb, we find that applications from guests with distinctively African American names are 16 percent less likely to be accepted relative to identical guests with distinctively white names. Discrimination occurs among landlords of all...

Traditional Beliefs and Learning about Maternal Risk in Zambia

By Nava Ashraf, Erica Field, Giuditta Rusconi, Alessandra Voena, and Roberta Ziparo

American Economic Review, May 2017

Maternal mortality remains very high in many parts of the developing world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. While maternal deaths are observable, it may not be straightforward for individuals to learn about risk factors. This paper utilizes novel data o...

Excess Male Infant Mortality: The Gene-Institution Interactions

By Roland Pongou, Barthelemy Kuate Defo, and Zacharie Tsala Dimbuene

American Economic Review, May 2017

Excess male mortality at early ages is an important source of child inequality in most societies. We examine how improvement in the quality of political institutions affects the male survival disadvantage. Using data on twins in combination with a natural...

Keeping It in the Family: Lineage Organization and the Scope of Trust in Sub-Saharan Africa

By Jacob Moscona, Nathan Nunn, and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, May 2017

We present evidence that the traditional structure of society is an important determinant of the scope of trust today. Within Africa, individuals belonging to ethnic groups that organized society using segmentary lineages exhibit a more limited scope of t...

This Mine Is Mine! How Minerals Fuel Conflicts in Africa

By Nicolas Berman, Mathieu Couttenier, Dominic Rohner, and Mathias Thoenig

American Economic Review, June 2017

We combine georeferenced data on mining extraction of 14 minerals with information on conflict events at spatial resolution of 0.5 degree x 0.5 degree for all of Africa between 1997 and 2010. Exploiting exogenous variations in world prices, we find a posi...

Why Are Indian Children So Short? The Role of Birth Order and Son Preference

By Seema Jayachandran and Rohini Pande

American Economic Review, September 2017

Child stunting in India exceeds that in poorer regions like sub-Saharan Africa. Data on over 168,000 children show that, relative to Africa, India's height disadvantage increases sharply with birth order. We posit that India's steep birth order gradient i...

Enrollment without Learning: Teacher Effort, Knowledge, and Skill in Primary Schools in Africa

By Tessa Bold, Deon Filmer, Gayle Martin, Ezequiel Molina, Brian Stacy, Christophe Rockmore, Jakob Svensson, and Waly Wane

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2017

School enrollment has universally increased over the last 25 years in low-income countries. Enrolling in school, however, does not assure that children learn. A large share of children in low-income countries complete their primary education lacking even ...

The Impact of AIDS Treatment on Savings and Human Capital Investment in Malawi

By Victoria Baranov and Hans-Peter Kohler

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2018

Antiretroviral therapy (ART), a treatment for AIDS, is rapidly increasing life expectancy throughout sub-Saharan African countries affected by the AIDS epidemic. This change in life expectancy has potentially profound influences on life-cycle decisions. A...

A Review Essay on Howard Bodenhorn's The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South

By Allison Shertzer

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2018

In The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South, Howard Bodenhorn investigates the origins, health, and socioeconomic performance of mixed-race people in the antebellum Southern United States. The c...

Extreme Inequality: Evidence from Brazil, India, the Middle East, and South Africa

By Lydia Assouad, Lucas Chancel, and Marc Morgan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

This paper presents new findings about inequality dynamics in Brazil, India, the Middle East, and South Africa from the World Inequality Database (WID.world). We combine tax data, household surveys, and national accounts in a systematic manner to produce ...

The Price of Labor: Evaluating the Impact of Eliminating User Fees on Maternal and Infant Health Outcomes

By Anne Fitzpatrick

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Since 2001, several sub-Saharan African countries have eliminated user fees for childbirth. Although intended to improve maternal and infant health outcomes, service quality also fell as facilities became overburdened. In this paper I combine DHS surveys ...

Legal Origins and Female HIV

By Siwan Anderson

American Economic Review, June 2018

More than one-half of all people living with HIV are women, and 80 percent of all HIV-positive women in the world live in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper demonstrates that the legal origins of these formerly colonized countries significantly determine cu...

Academic Peer Effects with Different Group Assignment Policies: Residential Tracking versus Random Assignment

By Robert Garlick

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

I study the relative academic performance of students tracked or randomly assigned to South African university dormitories. Tracking reduces low-scoring students' GPAs and has little effect on high-scoring students, leading to lower and more dispersed GPA...

Ethnolinguistic Favoritism in African Politics

By Andrew Dickens

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

African political leaders have a tendency to favor members of their own ethnic group. Yet for all other ethnic groups in a country, it is unclear whether having a similar ethnicity to the leader is beneficial. To shed light on this issue, I use a continuo...

The Macrogenoeconomics of Comparative Development

By Quamrul H. Ashraf and Oded Galor

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2018

The importance of evolutionary forces for comparative economic performance across societies has been the focus of a vibrant literature, highlighting the roles played by the Neolithic Revolution as well as the prehistoric "out of Africa" migration of ana...

The Arrival of Fast Internet and Employment in Africa

By Jonas Hjort and Jonas Poulsen

American Economic Review, March 2019

To show how fast Internet affects employment in Africa, we exploit the gradual arrival of submarine Internet cables on the coast and maps of the terrestrial cable network. Robust difference-in-differences estimates from 3 datasets, covering 12 countries, ...

Traditional Medicine in Central Africa

By Sara Lowes and Eduardo Montero

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In many settings, traditional medicine is a popular, accessible, and affordable alternative to modern medicine. Understanding the determinants of the use of traditional medicine is important because it is widespread and because of the growing evidence of ...

There Is No Free House: Ethnic Patronage in a Kenyan Slum

By Benjamin Marx, Thomas M. Stoker, and Tavneet Suri

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2019

Using unique data from one of Africa's largest informal settlements, the Kibera slum in Nairobi, we provide evidence of ethnic patronage in the determination of rental prices and investments. Slum residents pay higher rents and live in lower quality housi...