Why slavery was practised in certain US regions and not in others and why specific groups of Africans were transported in such great numbers to the New World is both a historically fundamental and economically relevant question. It has been shown that African slavery sowed seeds of deep political and economic inequalities that persist to this day (Engerman and Sokoloff, 1997). Slavery also hindered the long-term growth prospects of African populations subjected to slave raids and enslavement, fostering fractionalization and distrust (Nunn, 2007; Nunn and Wantchekon, 2011). Several historians ..read more

Colonial history has left its mark on the education systems of many developing countries. In Africa, the British colonial legacy on education has been more benign than the legacy of other colonisers, especially the French. The British devolved educational investments to Christian missions, while the French limited missionary efforts without investing in mass public education. The resulting divergence between former British and former French colonies in quantitative education measures, like enrolment rates, is well known (Cogneau and Moradi 2014, Dupraz 2019). However, colonial effects on educa ..read more

Inequality regimes in the African context In recent years, the study of economic inequality has taken on a more global and historical perspective. Scholars such as Thomas Piketty, Branko Milanovic, and Walter Scheidel have challenged traditional ideas about the drivers of long-term trends in income and wealth distribution. This new global inequality literature has so far had little to say about Africa. Perhaps this is because available inequality estimates for Africa are patchy and the problem of persistent poverty was long deemed of greater importance than that of unequal distribution (Fosu 2 ..read more

A common explanation for the transition to modern economic growth is the fertility transition, which lead to greater investment in children, lower population pressures, and increased female labour force participation. Therefore, capturing the demographic dividend by decreasing fertility via family planning in developing regions such as the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia has often been a key goal in recent development programs. However, the fertility transition is not the only historical change in fertility patterns. The Middle Eastern marriage pattern  Preceding the trans ..read more

Addressing endogeneity in favoritism studies A large literature on favoritism in Africa argues that leaders favor their own ethnicity or administrative birthplace.  This narrative of nepotistic bias posits that leaders often channel resources toward these regions, driving significant infrastructure development. Yet, recent studies challenge this narrative, offering nuanced alternatives that cast a more complex light on the issue. Our recent study published in the Review of Development Economics is one such outlier. We confront the implicit assumption within favoritism studies that leaders ..read more

Economic development requires a state that can provide basic public goods to support the operation of markets, including courts of law and infrastructure. It therefore seems natural to blame the apparently sluggish pace of development in much of Africa over the past century on weak and fragile states (Herbst, 2000; Besley and Persson, 2014). Surely weak institutions imply a low ability to collect taxes, which in turn acts as a brake on development? While this narrative has increasingly been questioned by detailed historical work on tax collection in Africa (Frankema and Waijenburg, 2014; Gardn ..read more

Polygyny, the practice of a man marrying more than one woman, is a common practice in many parts of the world, particularly in the African “polygyny belt”, stretching from Senegal to Tanzania, where between a third and a half of married women are in a polygynous union. The practice of polygyny, however, decreased significantly in the past century (Fenske 2015). This decrease is arguably one of the most significant transformation of marriage practices around the world. Did the expansion of primary education in the 20th century play a role in the decrease of polygyny? In 1950, less than a third ..read more

For decades, the link between manufacturing, economic development, and colonialism during the globalizing nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been subject to considerable debate. Dependency-school theorists have long argued that imperial ‘core’ countries stifled domestic handicraft industries in the ‘periphery’ by flooding colonial markets with low-cost manufactures from the metropole while coercing colonized people to channel their labour into the production of raw materials (Frank 1966; Rodney 1972). More recently, neoclassical economists have contended that industrial development was inh ..read more

The race between education and technology The historical co-evolution of technology, schooling, and labour market institutions, also known as the ‘race between education and technology’, is a central theme in the literature on modern economic growth and inequality. The idea of a ‘race’, as Jan Tinbergen (1975) called it, refers to three central features of the modern economy: continuous technological change that requires flexible education systems to equip labour forces with the knowledge and skills to work with frontier technologies, and to keep the cycle of innovations going. While in-depth ..read more

Health and wealth are positively correlated across a range of dimensions, but the causal mechanisms remain unclear. This is because health and wealth are inextricably bound up with each other, making it challenging to disentangle cause and effect. Consequently, the question of how later-life outcomes respond to the gain or loss of wealth and how persistent these effects are over time remains open. Experimentation is difficult since it is not possible to randomize people’s wealth on a large enough scale to test the relationship between wealth and health. Traditional quasi-experimental designs u ..read more