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...

I examine the possibility that the trans-Atlantic slave trades influenced the political institutions of villages and towns in precolonial Africa. Using anthropological data, I show that villages and towns of ethnic groups with higher slave exports were more politically fragmented during the...

I examine the relationship between social and human capital in colonial Western Nigeria. Using data on expenditure of cocoa farmers in 1952, I show that farmers in townships with higher social spending individually spend more on education. The relationship holds after controlling for various...

I use satellite imagery on night time lights to measure growth across states and local government areas in Nigeria since the return of democracy in 1999. I show that states in Southern Nigeria have grown faster on average than states in the North. I also evaluate the effects of violence on...