Arbitrarily designed borders have been identified by a recent literature as an important reason why sub-Saharan Africa remains one of the poorest regions on the globe. Accordingly, border changes may be a way to promote growth on the African continent. In this paper, we study the effect of...

Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...

Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...

An important stylized fact about African economic development is the phenomenon of urbanization without structural transformation. This paper provides a political economy analysis of the lack of structural transformation in African cities, drawing on the Deals and Development framework. It...

Economic theory long acknowledged a positive relation between human capital and economic growth (Smith, 1776; Becker, 1964), which was nevertheless called into question in the late 1990s (Caselli et al. 1996; Pritchett, 2001). The two primary criticisms evoked were the failure to consider diminishing...

Using changes in the possession of household assets over the past 20 years, several recent papers have argued that economic performance in Arica was substantially better than suggested by national income data and income poverty statistics, who suffer from well-known weaknesses. We scrutinize...

Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...

Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...

GDP growth is often measured poorly for countries and rarely measured at all for cities. We propose a readily available proxy: satellite data on lights at night. Our statistical framework uses light growth to supplement existing income growth measures. The framework is applied to countries with...

A recent literature suggests that arbitrarily designed administrative borders are an important reason why sub-Saharan Africa remains one of the least developed regions on the globe. Accordingly, administrative border reforms may be a way to promote growth on the African continent. In this paper,...