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...

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...

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...

This paper investigates empirically the integration of bond markets of emerging market economies into the global bond markets from 2003 to 2012. The paper employs factor analysis based on the Arbitrage Pricing Theory to extract global factors from a panel of 38 bond yields of advanced and...

Zimbabwe had witnessed socio-economic challenges that resulted in mass exodus of its populace across its boarders mainly from the late 1990s. Migration can be individual or household strategy for survival and remittances play a role in transforming the household income. Making use of ordinary...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous default on entrepreneur loans and funds borrowed from the central bank (liquidity injections) and investigates the welfare cost of sovereign default. The results show that sovereign default affects production through...

This study analyses the relationship between disaggregated credit extension and financial distress in South Africa. It commences by constructing a composite indicator of financial distress and then examines its correlation with components of disaggregated credit extension. Of particular interest...

This paper analyses the modernisation hypothesis in the sub-Saharan African region. Using a sample of 48 countries from 1960 to 2010 and dynamic panel data analysis, we find a significant and negative relationship between income and democracy, an indication that the hypothesis may not hold in...

This study develops an economic fertility model which explicitly incorporates both the costs of childrearing and contraception behaviour. In this setting, a couple capacity to procreate depends on their fecundity, as well as their contraception and sexual behaviours; and the ideal number of...

This paper analyses the relationship between financial stress indicator variables and monetary policy in South Africa with emphasis on how robust these variables are related to the monetary policy interest rate. The financial stress indicator variables comprise a set of variables from the main...