Is ethnicity the critical determinant of election results in Africa? We investigate this question empirically on the 2004 presidential poll in Ghana. We use variables from several data sources matched at the district level, and perform econometric analysis on the turnout rate and party vote...

The body of literature on purely democratic countries can sometimes fail to explain the behavior of government in semi-democratic African countries. Empirical and theoretical political economic papers find that public funds target ruling party supporters and swing districts. Our results,...

(english) In this paper we use a simple standard overlapping-generation model to assess the impact of foreign aid. Because of deference to the elders, donors are not able to modify the sharing out of aid between the old and the young in the recipient economy. The model shows that, if aid is...

(english) In this paper, we are interested in the effect of birth status, being born out-of-wedlock or in wedlock, on survival chance before two years old of siblings of same gender in Senegal. The analysis is based on nationally representative data, those from the Demographic and health survey,...

(english) We use a representative sample of informal entrepreneurs in Madagascar to add new evidence on the magnitude of the gender performance gap. After controlling for business and entrepreneur characteristics, female-owned businesses exhibit a value added 28 percent lower than their male...

(english) This paper uses data from recent Senegalese Demographic and Health Surveys to explore the link between female empowerment and child mortality via early marriage, defined as marriage before age 16. There exist three channels through which early marriage reduces a mother's ability to...

(english) In January 2010, Haiti has been hit by the worst earthquake in its dramatic history. It was followed by an unprecedented international mobilization. Since then, a succession of natural disasters has struck the country (floods, epidemics, etc.). At the commemoration of the fourth...

(english) The classical and more recent theories on development all fail to explain Madagascar’s long-running economic underperformance. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of Malagasy history based on the analytical framework of political economy. Our analyses point to the fact that,...

(english) This paper fills the gap between individual selection models and collective approaches of migration. We build a theoretical model in order to account for household-based migration decisions and derive its implications on migrant selection. Assuming that the origin household maximizes a...

This paper explores the impact of Malian migrants' Home Town Associations (HTAs) located in France on the provision of local public goods in Mali. To this end, we compute an original dataset on all the HTAs that have been created by Malian migrants in France since 1981 and geo-localize their...