We quantify the extent to which public-sector employment crowds out private-sector employment using specially assembled datasets for a large cross-sector of developing and advanced countries.  Regressions of either private-sector employment rates or unemployment rates on two measures of...

We gave US$1,000 cash prizes to winners of a business ideas competition in Africa.  The competition, entitled 'Aspire' is intended to attract young individuals aspiring to become entrepreneurs.  Participants were ranked by panels of judges composed of established entrepreneurs.  Each panel...

Job creation is a central part of the policy of almost all African countries.  The problems are particularly acute in Nigeria where over the period of the early 2000s there was a substantial decline in the number of private wage jobs.  While policy discussion focuses on the extent of...

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...