Digital technologies can expand access to health services to underserved populations. This paper leverages mobile network expansion and survey data spanning two decades to study the impact of access to mobile phones on infant mortality in Africa. Using plausibly exogenous variations in lightning...

Does ambient infrastructural quality affect foreign direct investment (FDI) in developing countries This paper investigates how the arrival of high-speed internet in Africa triggered FDI into the banking and technology services sectors. It also explores the role of complementary infrastructure,...

This paper presents evidence on how the provision of unreliable electricity constrains expansion in the productive sectors of the economy, consequently leading to a reduction in the number of employment opportunities in Africa. Using geodata on electricity transmission networks on the continent,...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruptions to economies around the world. In response to this, some developing countries offered reliefs such as electricity subsidies while others did not. How did the pandemic affect the electricity consumption of households and firms Did the utility...

This paper presents global evidence on the impact of expansion in mobile telephony and broadband Internet services on economic development at the subnational level. Leveraging two decades of satellite data on nightlights and the global expansion of 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile networks in over 34,000...

This paper applies a local-linear non-parametric kernel regression technique to examine the effect of macroeconomic factors on stock market performance in Ghana. We show that the popular parametric specification in the existing literature suffers from functional misspecification. The evidence...

In this paper, we examine the relationship between childhood exposure to adverse weather shocks and nutritional and health outcomes of children in Tanzania. Using household panel data matched with spatially disaggregated data on weather shocks, we exploit the plausibly exogenous variations in...

The general policy prescription for resource-rich countries is that, for sustainable consumption, a greater percentage of the windfall from resource rents should be channelled into accumulating foreign assets such as a sovereign public fund as done in Norway and other developed but resource-rich...