I show how abundant land and scarce labor shaped African institutions before colonial rule. I present a model in which exogenous land quality and endogenously evolving population determine the existence of land rights, slavery, and polygyny. I use cross-sectional data on pre-colonial African...

African societies exported more slaves in colder years. Lower temperatures reduced mortality and raised agricultural yields, lowering slave supply costs. Our results help explain African participation in the slave trade, which predicts adverse outcomes today. We use an annual panel of African...

African societies exported more slaves in colder years. Lower temperatures reduced mortality and raised agricultural yields, lowering the cost of supplying slaves. Our results help explain African participation in the slave trade, which is associated with adverse outcomes today. We merge annual...

Motivated by a simple model, I use DHS data to test nine hypotheses about the prevalence and decline of African polygamy. First, greater female involvement in agriculture does not increase polygamy. Second, past inequality better predicts polygamy today than does current inequality. Third, the...

Both India and Eritrea are developing countries. India as a leader of Third world made a huge stride in human resource development and agriculture development where as Eritrea, a young nation still striving hard to develop these areas and thus achieve self reliance. In line with this, Eritrea...

The conventional view is that an increase in the value of a natural resource will lead private property to emerge. Many Igbo groups in Nigeria, however, curtailed private rights over palm trees in response to the palm produce trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I present a...

Human development is the beginning of economic growth. The main purpose of wealth should be to enrich people’s lives, to broaden people’s choices and to enable every citizen, every child, every woman and every man to reach her or his full potential. Yet, as the experience of many countries...