We study the role of corporate governance in abnormal returns around announcements of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) by publicly traded U. S. firms from 2001 - 2004. We find that investors react more positively for firms in which different people hold the CEO and board chairman positions. We...

We explore the effect of historical ethnic borders on contemporary conflict in Africa. We document that the intensive and extensive margins of contemporary conflict are higher close to historical ethnic borders. Exploiting variations across artificial regions within an ethnicity's historical...

This paper examines the implications for African economies of the possible outcomes from the ongoing agriculture negotiations in the Doha Round. The paper defines scenarios that capture key elements of the modalities negotiations and undertakes simulations using a global dynamic general...

Agricultural productivity in Africa from 1971 to 2000 is examined using the recently developed metafrontier function technique, for the purpose of studying differences in efficiency and technology gap across different regions of the continent. The results support the view that technology gap...

Access to high-value markets remains one of the major challenges facing smallholder farmers in Africa. The paper applies a value chain analysis to the pigeonpea sub-sector in Malawi to determine ways of improving the access of small farmers to the global pigeonpea markets. The value chain...

In spite of the intention of governments to increase the use of renewable energy in electricity supply, particularly the use of solar photovoltaic (PV) for energy poverty reduction in rural and peri-urban areas of Africa, there is relatively little information on how solar PV electrification...

There is a large body of anecdotal evidence from sub-Saharan Africa of widespread medical distrust leading to health program failures. In this paper, to isolate an exogenous variation in trust in medicine to explain contemporary health demand in sub-Saharan Africa, we rely on a widespread...

There is a large body of anecdotal evidence from sub-Saharan Africa of widespread medical distrust leading to health program failures. In this paper, to isolate an exogenous variation in trust in medicine to explain contemporary health demand in sub-Saharan Africa, we rely on a widespread...

In this review, I discuss the role of African institutions in general and pre-colonial institutions in particular in explaining present-day African poverty. Six of the most often cited explanations of African poverty -- geography, ethnolinguistic fractionalization, the slave trades, colonial...

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...