The conventional view is that an increase in the value of a natural resource can lead to private property over it.  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...

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,...

We test whether early-life war exposure influences later-life political engagement in Africa.  We combine data on the location and intensity of conflicts since 1954 with nationally representative data on political attitudes and behaviors from 17 sub-Saharan African countries.  Exposure from...

We show that psychological well-being in adulthood varies substantially with circumstance in early life.  Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we find that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early...

State capacity matters for growth.  I test Bates' explanation of pre-colonial African states.  He argues that trade across ecological boundaries promoted states.  I find that African societies in ecologically diverse environments had more centralized states.  This is robust to reverse...

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...

We examine the determinants of time allocation and child labour in a year-long panel of time-use data from colonial Nigeria.  Using quantitative and ethnographic approaches, we show that health shocks imposed time costs on individuals.  Whether individuals could recruit substitutes depended on...

We consider an observer who makes a finite number of observations of an industry producing a homogeneous good, where each observation consists of the market price and firm specific production quantities.  We develop a revealed preference test (in the form of a linear program) for the hypothesis...

Although Nigeria’s Benin region was a major rubber producer in 1960, the industry faltered before 1921. I use labour scarcity and state capacity to explain why rubber did not take hold in this period. The government was unable to protect Benin’s rubber forests from...

At the start of the Second World War, British policies restricted rubber planting in Nigeria’s Benin region. After Japan occupied Southeast Asia, Britain encouraged maximum production of rubber in Benin. Late in the war, officials struggled with the planting boom that had occurred. The...