Since the start of the century, many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have experienced large gains in life expectancy and average consumption levels. Around the same time, an unprecedented international effort has taken place to combat HIV/AIDS mortality with the expansion of anti-retroviral...

We live in an era of growing economic inequality. Luminaries ranging from the President to the Pope to economist Thomas Piketty in his bestselling book Capital in the Twenty- First Century have raised alarms about the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. Overlooked, however, in these...

Studies on the causes of income differences between the rich and the poor have received an extensive attention in the inequality empirics. While ethnic diversity h asalso been identified as one of the fundamental causes of income inequality, the role of institutions as a mediating factor in the...

We show that ethnic distances can explain the ethnic inequalities in child mortality rates in Africa. Using individual level micro data from DHS surveys for fourteen Sub-Saharan African countries combined with a novel high resolution dataset on the spatial distribution of ethnic groups we show...

Does higher resource inequality between ethnic groups lead to ethnic conflict? In this paper, we empirically investigate this question by constructing a new measure of inequality using rainfall on ethnic homelands during the plant-growing season. Our dataset covers the period 1982-2001 and...

The prominent role of financial inclusion in every economy-as it has been widely acknowledged as an enabler to achieving eight out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) cannot be overemphasized as far as the welfare of individuals is concerned. This study estimates the effects of...