Peer review and public-private partnerships hinge on transparency. Transparency is about commonly shared knowledge about the economy, its performance, and the way policy influences it. The Composite Indicator of Economic Activity in Mozambique (ICAE) is a tool of knowledge whose construction is...

In this paper I build an equilibrium search model of the urban Tanzanian labour market that explains the choice between wage and self-employment and the variation in earnings across and within these sectors. Self-employment is very common in urban Tanzania and survey data show both that there...

We show that the long-run consequences of historical warfare are different for Sub-Saharan Africa than for the rest of the Old World. We identify the locations of over 1,750 conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe from 1400 to 1799. We find that historical warfare predicts greater state capacity...

When the Tanzanian government formalized over 200,000 informal land claims by granting leasehold titles to residents of unplanned settlements in Dar es Salaam in 2004, a few neighborhoods in the initial plan were excluded due to missing satellite photos. We examine the impact of this low-cost,...

How did Ghanaian manufacturing firms change in the period between 2003 and 2013? This paper presents results from a survey of 1000 firms in Ghana, conducted in 2013, which were randomly selected from the 2003 Ghanaian National Industrial Census. This survey allows us to track survival and exit...

Government intervention in land transactions is common in developing countries, especially where land markets function poorly. This is the case in Ethiopia, where expropriation of farmland from small-scale farmers has been used by all levels of government as a tool for providing new land for...

This paper uses experimental methods to study the impact of limited enforcement and reputation on employer-worker relations in labour markets in Ghana. Participants, students recruited from universities in Accra, Ghana are designated as either employers or workers and play a gift-exchange game...