This paper aims to provide the first evidence concerning the relationship between time and risk preferences and illegal migration in an African context. Based upon our theoretical model and using a unique data set on potential migrants collected in urban Senegal, we evaluate a measure of time...

We formalize the link between optimal cost-sharing contracts and the production technology in the presence of moral hazard by appealing to several well-known results from duality theory. Building on intuitions from the interlinkage literature, we show that optimal contractual structure is...

When market structure is complete, factor demands by households will be independent of their characteristics, and households will take their production decisions as if they were profit-maximizing firms. This observation constitutes the basis for one of the most popular empirical tests for...

In this paper we consider the link often alleged between ethnic diversity and the growth rate of GDP per capita. We first assume that it is ethnic polarization rather than ethnic fragmentation that is harmful for growth so that the relationship may be non-linear. Second, we hypothesize that the...

This paper, relying on the results of several cross-sectionnal growth regressions, examines the factors determining the sustainability of policy reforms and growth in Africa. Five structural factors are considered as determinants of policy: 1) ethno-linguistic fragmentation, which influences...

In the standard problem of mechanism design under adverse selection, it is well known that the transfer function from the principal to the agent will be increasing in the agent's unknown productivity when there exists an incentive compatible mechanism. Cost-sharing contracts in LDC agriculture...

This paper considers whether it is differences in technical efficiency or differences in factor endowments that explain productivity differentials in Moldovan agriculture. We compute non-parametric measures of technical efficiency for a sample of Moldovan small-holders using the four-step Data...

African politics are often said to be dominated by ethnic divides, with the ensuing policies implemented by leaders being based almost exclusively on their ethnic power base. In this paper, we demonstrate that the identity of leaders matters for the attribution of development projects in the...

Based on an annual sample of 122 countries over the 1963-1994 period, this paper shows that real exchange rate depreciation reduces deforestation in relatively developed countries (with GDP per capita greater than $900) whereas it has the opposite effect in poor countries. A possible explanation...

Deforestation is a phenomenon that has largely been concentrated in the developing world. We construct a theoretical model of deforestation that focuses on the factors affecting the incentives to transform forested land into agricultural land. We show that: (i) lower discount rates and stronger...