Little is known about the extent and forces of urban path dependence in developing countries. Railroad construction incolonialKenyaprovidesanaturalexperimenttostudytheemer- gence and persistence of this spatial equilibrium. Using new data...

The partition of German Togoland after WWI provides a natural experiment allowing to test what impact colonial policies really had. Using a data set of recruits to the Ghana colonial army 1908-1955, we find literacy and religious beliefs to diverge at the border between British and French...

The field of African economic history is in resurgence. This paper reviews recent and on-going research contributions and notes strengths in their wide methodological, conceptual and topical variety. In these strengths there is also a challenge: different methodological approaches may also...

Using a complete panel of Ghanaian cocoa producers’ societies in the 1930s, we investigate whether group interaction problems threatened i) capital accumulation, ii) cocoa sales and iii) cooperative survival as membership size increased. We find evidence of group interaction problems. The net...

Using true and pseudo panel data of localities and households, we study the effects of Burkina Faso’s large scale electricity grid expansion 2008-2017. We show that the timing of electrification was driven by engineering constraints and thus largely exogenous. We investigate the effects of...