Explaining African Economic Performance

By Paul Collier and Jan Willem Gunning

Journal of Economic Literature, March 1999

Africa has had slow growth and a massive exodus of capital. In many respects it has been the most capital-hostile region. We review and interpret the aggregate-level and microeconomic literatures to identify the key explanations for this performance. Ther...

The Roma/Non-Roma Test Score Gap in Hungary

By Gábor Kertesi and Gábor Kézdi

American Economic Review, May 2011

This paper documents and decomposes the test score gap between Roma and non-Roma 8th graders in Hungary in 2006. Our data connect national standardized test scores to an individual panel survey with detailed data on ethnicity and family background. The te...

The Impact of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on Ethnic Stratification in Africa

By Warren Whatley and Rob Gillezeau

American Economic Review, May 2011

In the last 15 years, economists and economic historians have argued that Africa has undergone a "reversal of fortune" and that ethnic fragmentation is a significant cause of Africa's underdevelopment. In this article, we join these narratives by arguing ...

Global Financial Crisis and Africa: Is the Impact Permanent or Transitory? Time Series Evidence from North Africa

By Hassan Y. Aly and Mark C. Strazicich

American Economic Review, May 2011

We utilize time series tests with structural breaks to test for an adverse impact on economic growth rates in North Africa associated with the recent US financial crisis and global recession. One or two breaks are identified for each country, except for M...

Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict: A Comment

By Antonio Ciccone

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

Edward Miguel, Shanker Satyanath, and Ernest Sergenti (2004), henceforth MSS, argue that lower rainfall levels and negative rainfall shocks increase conflict risk in sub-Saharan Africa. This conclusion rests on their finding of a negative correlation betw...

Re-examining Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict

By Edward Miguel and Shanker Satyanath

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2011

Miguel, Satyanath, and Ernest Sergenti (2004), henceforth MSS, show that economic growth is negatively related to civil conflict in Africa, using annual rainfall variation as an IV for growth. Antonio Ciccone (2011) argues that thanks to rainfall's mean-r...

The Effects of Rural Electrification on Employment: New Evidence from South Africa

By Taryn Dinkelman

American Economic Review, December 2011

This paper estimates the impact of electrification on employment growth by analyzing South Africa's mass roll-out of electricity to rural households. Using several new data sources and two different identification strategies (an instrumental variables str...

The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa

By Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon

American Economic Review, December 2011

We show that current differences in trust levels within Africa can be traced back to the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. Combining contemporary individual-level survey data with historical data on slave shipments by ethnic group, we find that...

Measuring Economic Growth from Outer Space

By J. Vernon Henderson, Adam Storeygard, and David N. Weil

American Economic Review, April 2012

We develop a statistical framework to use satellite data on night lights to augment official income growth measures. For countries with poor national income accounts, the optimal estimate of growth is a composite with roughly equal weights on conventional...

War and Stature: Growing Up during the Nigerian Civil War

By Richard Akresh, Sonia Bhalotra, Marinella Leone, and Una Okonkwo Osili

American Economic Review, May 2012

The Nigerian civil war of 1967-70 was precipitated by secession of the Igbo-dominated south-eastern region to create the state of Biafra. It was the first civil war in Africa, the predecessor of many. We investigate the legacies of this war four decades l...

High Unemployment Yet Few Small Firms: The Role of Centralized Bargaining in South Africa

By Jeremy R. Magruder

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2012

South Africa has very high unemployment, yet few adults work informally in small firms. This paper tests whether centralized bargaining, by which unionized large firms extend arbitration agreements to nonunionized smaller firms, contributes to this probl...

Symposium on the Economic Status of African-Americans

[Symposium: The Economic Status of African-Americans]

By Henry J. Aaron

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1990

The purpose of this symposium is to explore a number of controversial issues that divide economists and remain relevant to current debates on public policy. The central questions explored in these papers concern the economic progress of American blacks: W...

Globalization, Brain Drain, and Development

By Frédéric Docquier and Hillel Rapoport

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

This paper reviews four decades of economics research on the brain drain, with a focus on recent contributions and on development issues. We first assess the magnitude, intensity, and determinants of the brain drain, showing that brain drain (or high-skil...

The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation: Reply

By Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson

American Economic Review, October 2012

Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2001) established that economic institutions today are correlated with expected mortality of European colonialists. David Albouy argues this relationship is not robust. He drops all data from Latin America and much of the ...

The 'Out of Africa' Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development

By Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor

American Economic Review, February 2013

This research advances and empirically establishes the hypothesis that, in the course of the prehistoric exodus of Homo sapiens out of Africa, variation in migratory distance to various settlements across the globe affected genetic diversity and has ha...

The Effect of Absenteeism and Clinic Protocol on Health Outcomes: The Case of Mother-to-Child Transmission of HIV in Kenya

By Markus Goldstein, Joshua Graff Zivin, James Habyarimana, Cristian Pop-Eleches, and Harsha Thirumurthy

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2013

We show that pregnant women whose first clinic visit coincides with the nurse's attendance are 58 percentage points more likely to test for HIV and 46 percent more likely to deliver in a hospital. Furthermore, women with high pretest expectations of be...

Earnings Inequality and the Intersectionality of Gender and Ethnicity in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of Tanzanian Manufacturing

By Juliet U. Elu and Linda Loubert

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper estimates quantile earnings functions with data from the 2004 Tanzanian Household Worker Survey to determine if ethnicity and gender--being female--matters per se and across the distribution of earnings. We find that in the Tanzanian manufactur...

Access to Credit by Firms in Sub-Saharan Africa: How Relevant Is Gender?

By Elizabeth Asiedu, Isaac Kalonda-Kanyama, Leonce Ndikumana, and Akwasi Nti-Addae

American Economic Review, May 2013

The literature on the determinants of firms' financing constraints has paid little attention to gender as a determinant of access to finance. Using data for 34,342 firms from 90 developing countries, the paper analyzes the determinants of firms' financing...

Health Care Usage and Health Status of Immigrant Children: The Effects of Nativity versus Citizenship

By Mónica García-Pérez

American Economic Review, May 2013

This paper addresses the relationship between child access to and use of health services, perceived health, and parental nativity. Parental region of birth is identified to include the underlying cultural differences across immigrant groups. We found that...

HIV Risk and Adolescent Behaviors in Africa

By Anne Case and Christina Paxson

American Economic Review, May 2013

We investigate the relationship between HIV, marriage and nonmarital sexual activity, with a focus on adolescent behaviors. We use data from 45 Demographic and Health Surveys to examine how adolescent behavior among women born from 1958 to 1965 are relate...