Intergroup Economic Inequality in South Africa: The Post-apartheid Era

By George Sherer

American Economic Review, May 2000

Ethnicity and Development in Africa: A Reappraisal

By Robert H. Bates

American Economic Review, May 2000

Sanctions on South Africa: What Did They Do?

By Philip I. Levy

American Economic Review, May 1999

Portfolio Choices of Parents and Their Children as Young Adults: Asset Accumulation by African-American Families

By Ngina S. Chiteji and Frank P. Stafford

American Economic Review, May 1999

The Economic Performance of African-American-Owned Banks: The Role of Loan Loss Provisions

By Christopher C. Henderson

American Economic Review, May 1999

Credit and Banking Structure: Asian and African-American Experience in Los Angeles

By Gary Dymski and Lisa Mohanty

American Economic Review, May 1999

The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation

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

American Economic Review, December 2001

We exploit differences in European mortality rates to estimate the effect of institutions on economic performance. Europeans adopted very different colonization policies in different colonies, with different associated institutions. In places where Europe...

Mobile Phones and Economic Development in Africa

By Jenny C. Aker and Isaac M. Mbiti

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2010

Access to and use of mobile telephony in sub-Saharan Africa has increased dramatically over the past decade. Mobile telephony has brought new possibilities to the continent. Across urban-rural and rich-poor divides, mobile phones connect individuals to in...

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...