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...

Adult Antiretroviral Therapy and Child Health: Evidence from Scale-Up in Zambia

By Adrienne M. Lucas and Nicholas L. Wilson

American Economic Review, May 2013

One in five Zambian children lives with an HIV/AIDS-infected adult. We estimate the effect that the availability of adult antiretroviral therapy (ART) has on the health of such children. Using a triple difference specification, we find that adult access t...

Genetic Diversity and the Origins of Cultural Fragmentation

By Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor

American Economic Review, May 2013

The origin of the uneven distribution of ethnic and cultural fragmentation across countries has been underexplored, despite the importance attributed to the effects of diversity on the stability and prosperity of nations. Building on the role of deeply-ro...

Gifts of Mars: Warfare and Europe's Early Rise to Riches

By Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2013

Western Europe surged ahead of the rest of the world long before technological growth became rapid. Europe in 1500 already had incomes twice as high on a per capita basis as Africa, and one-third greater than most of Asia. In this essay, we explain how ...

Selection and Economic Gains in the Great Migration of African Americans: New Evidence from Linked Census Data

By William J. Collins and Marianne H. Wanamaker

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2014

The onset of World War I spurred the "Great Migration" of African Americans from the US South, arguably the most important internal migration in US history. We create a new panel dataset of more than 5,000 men matched from the 1910 to 1930 census manus...

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...