Blended finance---the use of public and philanthropic funding to crowd in private capital---is a potential way to finance a more sustainable world. While blended finance holds the promise of being catalytic in mobilizing vast amounts of private capital, little is known about this practice. In...

Between 1880 and 1920, the US agricultural employment share fell from 50% to 25%. However, despite aggregate demand shifting away from their sector of specialization, rural labor markets saw faster wage growth and industrialization than non-agricultural parts of the US. We propose a spatial...

1. The World Bank and Wolfensohn era reforms -- 2. The ABCs of the World Bank -- 3. A framework for modeling Bank behavior -- 4. The dynamics of epistemic economic change -- 5. Application to debt relief, participation and knowledge -- 6. Application to social capital -- 7. Application to...

We examine whether shared collective experiences can help build a national identity, by looking at the impact of national football teams' victories in sub- Saharan Africa. Combining individual survey data with information on official matches played between 2000 and 2015, we find that individuals...

We test the long-standing hypothesis that ethnic groups that are organized around `segmentary lineages' are more prone to conflict and civil war. Ethnographic accounts suggest that in segmentary lineage societies, which are characterized by strong allegiances to distant relatives, individuals...

This paper presents new evidence on the power sharing layout of national political elites in a panel of African countries, most of them autocracies. We present a model of coalition formation across ethnic groups and structurally estimate it employing data on the ethnicity of cabinet ministers...

The study of autocracies and weakly institutionalized countries is plagued by scarcity of information about the relative strength of different players within the political system. This paper presents novel data on the composition of government coalitions in a sample of fifteen post-colonial...