Nigerian data from the early 2000s indicates that formal sector earnings are about 70% higher than informal sector earnings but, for men, part of this is due to an educational composition effect.  The returns to education are lower in the informal sector than in the formal sector, but mainly at...

We aim at understanding the triggers of electoral violence, which spoiled 80% of elections in Africa during the last decades.  We focus on Burundi, a country which experienced polls in 2010, only a few months after the end of a long-lasting civil war.  Our results suggest that higher...

This chapter takes stock of the current state of banking systems across Sub-Saharan Africa and discusses recent developments including innovations that might help Africa leapfrog more traditional banking models.  Using an array of different data, we document that African banking systems are...

We report on a randomized field experiment using price incentives to address both economic and gender inequality in land tenure formalization.  During the 1990s and 2000s, nearly two dozen African countries proposed de jure land reforms extending access to formal, freehold land tenure to...

We study the impact of growth and growth accelerations on poverty and inequality in Indonesia using a new panel dataset covering 26 provinces over the period 1977-2010.  This new dataset allows us to distinguish between mining and non-mining sectors of the economy.  We find that growth in...

This paper explores the effect of news shocks on the current account and other macroeconomic variables using worldwide giant oil discoveries as a directly observable measure of news shocks about future output - the delay between a discovery and production is on average 4 to 6 years.  We first...

I develop a unique database of international fossil-fuel subsidies by examining country-specific patterns in carbon emission-to-GDP ratios, known as emission-intensities.  For most but not all countries, intensities tend to be hump-shaped with income.  I construct a model of...

Demand for oil is very price inelastic.  Facing such demand, an extractive cartell induces the highest price that does not destroy its demand, unlike the conventional Hotelling analysis: the cartel tolerates ordinary substitutes to its oil but deters high-potential ones.  Limit-pricing...

This paper evaluates whether immigration can mitigate the Dutch disease effects associated with booms in natural resource sectors.  We derive predicted changes in the size of the non-tradable sector from a small general-equilibrium model a la Obstfeld-Rogoff.  Using data for Canadian...

We estimate the impacts of being connected to politicians on occupational choice.  We use an administrative dataset collected in 2008-2010 on 20 million individuals and rely on naming conventions to assess family links to candidates in elections held in 2007 and 2010.  We first estimate the...