The returns to education remain a central concern for development policy. In developed countries there is evidence that the returns to education have been rising. Evidence for changes over this period for developing countries is limited. In this paper we use data from Kenya and Tanzania to...

Expansion in mobile phone coverage has improved access to information throughout the developing world, particularly within sub-Saharan Africa.  The existing evidence suggests that information technology has improved market efficiency and reduced consumer prices for certain commodities.  There...

Contemporary policy debates on the macroeconomics of aid often concentrate on short-run Dutch disease effects, ignoring the possible supply model of aid and public expenditure in which public infrastructure capital generates an inter-temporal productivity spill over for both tradable and...

In many developing countries, the beneficiaries of transfer programmes are determined by community-based processes, based on some general targeting rules related to needs.  This opens the door for local social and political processes to impact on who gets access.  Despite increasingly large...

Following the 2007 disputed Kenyan Presidential election unprecedented levels of violence erupted across the country adding to the history of troubled elections in Africa.  This paper offers quantitative and qualitative evidence on the incidence, impacts and issues that triggered electoral...

A large literature describes how local risk sharing networks can help individuals smooth consumption in the face of idiosyncratic economic shocks.  However, when an entire community faces a large covariate shock, and when the transaction costs of transfers are high, these risk sharing networks...

In Ghana there is a highly developed apprenticeship system where young men and women undertake sector-specific private training, which yields skills used primarily in the informal sector.  In this paper we use a 2006 urban based household survey with detailed questions on the background,...

To my knowledge this study undertakes the first comprehensive and systematic empirical test of the hypothesis that while returns to invested capital in Sub-Saharan Africa are high compared to select Asian and South American markets, investment rates are low.  I investigate three sources:...

This paper tests the external validity of a simple Dictator Game as a laboratory analogue for a naturally occurring policy-relevant decision-making context.  In Uganda, where teacher absenteeism is a problem, primary school teachers' allocations to parents in a Dictator Game are positively but...

We use survey data to investigate how urban households in Ethiopia coped with the food price shock in 2008 and idiosyncratic shocks.  Qualitative data indicate that the high food price inflation was by far the most adverse economic shock between 2004 and 2008, and that a significant proportion...