To the extent that in utero and childhood malnutrition negatively affects later stage mental and physical health, it can possibly constrain later stage human capital acquisition, which is an important driver of economic growth. This paper considers the impact of famine on aggregate adolescent...

We examine the association between indicators of real GDP per capita and the ACP1 genetic adaptation to disease and ultraviolet radiation environment. We find a strong impact that varies across the A, B, and C alleles. The result is robust to controlling for reversal of fortunes, migration, and...

This study measures the link between expected health and contextual health uncertainty on sexual behaviours associated with the risk of HIV infection. We extend similar studies on the subject by focusing on contextual factors as a way of explaining individual sexual behaviour in low and high HIV...

Even though antiretroviral treatment is becoming more efficient and available, new HIV infections still occur. This is particularly the case in sub-Saharan Africa. Sexual transmission of HIV is still the main mode of transmission in sub-Saharan Africa, and multiple sex partners have been shown...

Recent studies have highlighted the importance of Africa's history of slave exporting to its current economic development. In this paper I show that differences in investment in education may be one of the channels through which that history has affected current development. I combine data on...

In this paper I investigate whether democracy in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) has had any effect on education during the 1980-2009 period. The results, based on panel time-series analysis (I use the Pooled OLS and Fixed Effects estimators in order to deal with heterogeneity...

The lack of accurate measures of human capital formation often constrain investigations into the long-run determinants of growth and comparative economic development, especially in regions such as Africa. Using the reported age of criminals in the Courts of Justice records in the Cape Archive,...

To estimate the long-term, persistent effects of missionary education requires two strong assumptions: that mission station settlement is uncorrelated with other economic variables, such as soil quality and access to markets, and 2) that selection into (and out of) mission stations is...

This paper develops a model positing a nonlinear relationship between public investment and growth. The model is then applied to a panel of African countries using nonlinear estimating procedures. The growth-maximizing level of public investment is estimated at about 10 percent of GDP based on...

This paper presents an analysis of the interaction of human capital investment and the development of social and political institutions. We find that human capital matters - for growth through its quality dimension; for distributional conflict by raising political aspirations. But human capital...