Research

Why do societies differ in the extent to which they trust beyond the in-group? We argue that historical mobility regimes shape the scope of trust through the structure of the inter-group contact they generate. In particular, we show that frequent, competitive inter-group contact leads to the development of norms favoring greater in-group relative to out-group trust. Focusing on transhumant pastoralism, we document that ancestral reliance on seasonal livestock mobility predicts a narrower scope of trust today across a range of settings. The mechanism operates through repeated, competitive inter-group contact that narrows rather than broadens the scope of trust: seasonal migration along fixed routes brought pastoral groups into contact with competing groups over the same pastures and water points, generating fragile customary arrangements that collapsed under stress. Finally, we show that a narrower scope of trust constrains organizational hierarchies: firms in historically transhumant regions are more likely to be manager-owned, less likely to be incorporated or have dispersed ownership, employ fewer workers, and operate fewer plants. Together, these results highlight how the structure of inter-group contact shapes the scope of trust and continues to influence patterns of cooperation, conflict, and economic organization today.

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Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing large-scale cultural change. Christianity has spread widely and is now nearly universally adopted by non-Muslim populations. Despite this, traditional spiritual beliefs remain deeply rooted and continue to ground social, economic, and political life. Descriptive accounts – especially by African scholars – suggest that Christianity’s universal doctrine, which posits a single god and a single path to salvation, has had adverse consequences for traditional beliefs. We examine this relationship using data from the DRC and across Africa. Text analyses of sermons reveal that traditional customs and beliefs are frequently mentioned and almost always portrayed in a negative light. Behavioral experiments in the DRC show that individuals known to hold traditional beliefs are treated less prosocially and that antisocial norms and negative stereotypes support this behavior. Such effects are not found for any other characteristic; they appear among all subgroups of our sample; and they intensify with economic development. Patterns in cross-Africa survey data are consistent with the Congolese experimental findings. Finally, consistent with Christianity being a source of these effects, we find that in both the experiments and surveys, the findings are stronger in areas with more exposure to colonial missionary activity.

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We study a fundamental institution in many societies: the structure of property rights over land. Across societies, communal land rights have been more common than private land rights. We test the hypothesis that longer fallow requirements – the time needed to leave land uncultivated to restore fertility – led to a higher prevalence of communal property rights. Longer fallow requirements generate higher protection costs and therefore make communal rights more beneficial. We construct an ecological measure of the optimal fallow length for the most suitable staple crop across grid cells globally based on soil type, temperature, and climate. We find that places where land needs to be fallowed for longer periods are more likely to have communal property rights both historically and presently. We then examine the implications for efforts to title land. We find that World Bank land titling interventions are less effective in places with longer fallow requirements, suggesting a mismatch between development policy and underlying institutions. Finally, we examine implications for income inequality and conflict. We find that longer fallow requirements are associated with less inequality, less conflict, and greater resilience to negative shocks. Our results provide insight into the origins of property rights structures and how communal property rights interact with development policies.

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We study how local labour-market conditions shape illegal wildlife poaching in designated conservation areas. Using data on elephant poaching and the harvesting of endangered precious tree species across Africa and Asia, we document substitution between employment in local agriculture—the labour-intensive sector—and wildlife poaching. First, positive economic shocks to agriculture reduce poaching of both elephants and endangered trees. Second, a national-level crop minimum price or crop disaster insurance policies reduce elephant poaching. Third, a sector-biased, trade-liberalising reform that lowers agricultural employment increases elephant poaching. The empirical findings are consistent with predictions from a two-factor, two-good (2×2) international trade model, which we use as a conceptual framework. Finally, using household survey data on bushmeat consumption, we show that consumption patterns are highly correlated with poaching intensity and can serve as a proxy for poaching in regions where formal monitoring is limited. This approach expands the spatial coverage of poaching data and offers policymakers a practical tool for improving the monitoring and management of poaching crises.

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This paper investigates the educational legacies of Christian missions established before independence, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, focusing on contemporary disparities in educational content, quality, access, and outcomes. Using georeferenced data from over 20,000 schools and two million students participating in the Examen National d’État (Exetat) between 2016 and 2019, as well as primary data from a phone survey of 624 school directors, we explore how proximity to Catholic and Protestant missions during the colonial period influences educational opportunities today. We find that schools near historical Christian missions offer a broader and higher-quality curriculum, with increased access to study tracks outside the basic Pedagogy section. Students attending these schools are more likely to pass the Exetat and achieve grades qualifying for university admission, although the magnitude of the effect is modest. Supply-side factors, such as better infrastructure and more conducive school environments, explain half of the missionary proximity premium, while demand-side mechanisms, including students’ sorting and selection account for additional variation. Our findings reveal that the strong partnership between missions and the colonial state entrenched spatial inequalities in educational access and quality, inequalities that persist to this day.

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The AI revolution could lead to a large surge in inequality which raises questions about political consequences. Inequality is indeed often “accused” by politicians, journalists and academics alike of fueling armed conflict. Yet causal, systematic evidence on this nexus is all but lacking. To address this gap, we have built a new, disaggregate dataset covering Africa from 1989 to 2024. We investigate the impact of exogenous shifts in various forms of inequality on armed conflict, exploiting time-invariant agro-ecological suitability with year-to-year variation in global crop prices. We start from overall inequality and then rely on a recently developed methodology to decompose inequality into within- and between-ethnic group inequality measures. In the same vain, we are able to build specific measures for inequality shocks related to food versus cash crops. We uncover a strong conflict-fueling role of between-group inequality, while –maybe counter-intuitively– within-group inequality reduces conflict risks. This is consistent with frameworks where within-group trust is a key ingredient for collective action at the group level. Our mechanism analysis allows to disentangle channels of transmissions that are related to historical social norms and social capital formation..

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A large literature treats ethnicity as a proxy for persistent group-level political attitudes, beliefs, and opinions in Africa, often using historical ethnographic classifications. This paper reassesses that assumption by quantifying how individual-level variation in political attitudes and beliefs is distributed across ethnicity and geographic context. Using Afrobarometer surveys from 41 African countries linked to the Ethnographic Atlas, we show that ethnicity explains only a small share of variation across a wide range of outcomes, while subnational place consistently explains more. Within-place specifications further show that ethnicity adds little explanatory power once local context is held constant. We find, however, that the limited explanatory content of ethnicity is concentrated among groups that remain geographically close to their historical homelands and among ethnicities with higher levels of pre-colonial political centralization. Overall, the results indicate that ethnicity is a weak organizer of mass political attitudes and primarily matters when it proxies for shared local environments.

We highlight the role of private concessionary companies in colonizing Sub-Saharan Africa and analyze companies’ practices’ lasting legacies. First, we map the universe of concession companies across Sub-Saharan Africa and all colonial epochs, codifying their operations (plantation agriculture, charter companies, forestry, mining, trading), practices (use of forced labor, violence, and oppression), infrastructure build-up (roads, railroads, ports), human capital investments (schools, and health facilities), and productive investments (factories, ginneries, trading posts). The concessionary paradigm is widespread across all imperial powers and all colonial periods, suggesting a critical omission of recent economics research. There is a sizable spatial variation within colony/protectorate and, over time, a gradual decline in violence, rising investments, and a switch from infrastructure to human capital investments. Second, we characterize the presence and practices of concessions across time. While in the early phase of African colonization, concession companies moved into the interior, over time, they concentrated their operations closer to the sea, lakes, and rivers, in more fertile land, and less disease. Extraction, forced labor, and extreme violence are relatively more pervasive in low-population-density areas, plagued by malaria and yellow fever, supporting theories stressing labor scarcity and an unfavorable disease environment in shaping colonial practices. Third, we explore the local legacy of the concessionary paradigm on contemporary development, estimating hundreds of spatial Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) analyses. There is wide heterogeneity in companies’ legacies as reflected in nighttime lights and development proxies from the Demographic and Health Surveys. The spatial RDD estimates are highly heterogeneous across all colonial powers and company types, suggesting that extrapolating from single cases may be misleading. When distinguishing across practices, there is evidence that prison and forced labor, violence, and oppression of local workers go hand in hand with lower socio-economic outcomes. At the same time, historical investments correlate positively with contemporary development. Fourth, we provide regional aggregates of concessionary companies’ presence, operations, and practices that account for local spillovers and noise. Using census data and examining cohorts born during decolonization, we uncover sizable inertia from colonial times to independence and into contemporary times. Company extraction, violence, and monopsony-monopoly power are correlated adversely with household assets, education, and employment in services and manufacturing. Conversely, investments in infrastructure and human capital are correlated positively with contemporary development. By bringing to the forefront the role of private concessionary capital, a neglected but chief aspect of colonization, our work calls for research to understand the interplay between the colonial state and companies, the trade-offs of outsourcing colonization to for-profit enterprises, and the agency of imperialism.

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This research investigates the socioeconomic and environmental consequences of newly established market-based forest preservation policy, implemented by private enterprises in partnership with local governments and firms in sub-Saharan Africa. In return, these initiatives invest in local education, health, and infrastructure. We hand-collect data on—nearly—the universe of privately-run carbon concessions across Africa and, using a staggered event-study synthetic control approach, estimate their impact on both forest preservation and economic activity using nighttime luminosity data. To explore the underlying economic mechanisms, we employ a spatial regression discontinuity design with DHS data, comparing villages located just inside and just outside the concession boundaries. Preliminary evidence suggests that the establishment of these carbon concessions has a negative effect on local economic development.

Electoral autocracies increasingly use elections to project democratic legitimacy, yet credible micro-level data are rarely available. This project exploits leaked polling-station results from the 2018 Congolese presidential election and full 2023 disaggregated returns to examine (i) the drivers of political change, (ii) the persistence of authoritarian rule, and (iii) the consequences of electoral fraud. We first document the political economy of the 2018 negotiated alternation, in which Félix Tshisekedi was declared winner despite leaked and Catholic Church tallies showing a decisive victory for Martin Fayulu. Using a Fraud Perception Index, we show that areas most exposed to manipulation experienced large turnout declines in 2023, consistent with fraud-induced disengagement. We then analyze the determinants of pro-democratic voting using a new geocoded dataset capturing schools, school quality, missions, night-lights, mines, conflict, pre-colonial institutions, and colonial settlement patterns. Proximity to schools and higher education quality modestly predict pro-change voting, while historical factors also play a significant role. Finally, we investigate authoritarian resilience. Voting transitions from 2018 to 2023 reveal that elite alliances and ethno-regional networks, rather than programmatic appeal, drove Tshisekedi’s rise from 18% (true 2018 count) to 73% in 2023. The co-optation of figures such as Jean-Pierre Bemba reshaped regional voting patterns through entrenched patronage structures.

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How do societies maintain social order and resolve disputes in weak institutional contexts? Anthropologists have hypothesized that supernatural beliefs, such as those related to witchcraft, can provide informal systems of governance. Yet there is little direct empirical evidence on whether these beliefs affect conflict or can substitute for state or traditional authorities. In this paper, we examine the role of witchcraft in mitigating conflict in contexts with limited state presence. While such beliefs can serve as a source of suspicion and social division, often fueling conflict within communities, they can also provide a culturally legitimate mechanism for expressing grievances and resolving disputes in the absence of effective formal institutions. Our analysis discusses witchcraft as a second-best institution: although it can itself be a source of tension, in settings where formal governance is weak or absent, it can help regulate conflict that might otherwise escalate in more destructive ways. To test this hypothesis, we construct a retrospective panel on the presence of witchcraft accusations across communities in Eastern DRC. We show that areas with more resource extraction activity, particularly mining, have a higher incidence of witchcraft beliefs and accusations. This aligns with the notion that such beliefs emerge where the demand for informal governance is greatest. Moreover, we find that in these mining areas, witchcraft beliefs are associated with lower levels of conflict. Taken together, these results suggest that in settings with limited formal governance, communities may develop and rely on such beliefs as a substitute mechanism for dispute resolution and social order.

Endemic poverty, recurrent conflict, and weak state capacity-where governments struggle to assert authority, enforce contracts, and safeguard lives—often reinforce one another across much of Africa, constraining the effectiveness of foreign aid and domestic policies in education and health. Understanding the mechanisms underlying this fragility trap appears, therefore, crucial for policymakers, international organizations, and donor agencies in detecting poverty-trap hot- spots and designing potentially big-push interventions. This study links the modern African gatekeeper state to the patterns of violence, extraction, and investment that characterized the colonial period. We introduce a new, fine-grained dataset that systematically integrates information on colonial-era conflicts, forced labor practices, administrative presence, and public investments—schools, clinics, and infrastructure—across all of Sub-Saharan Africa from the Scramble for Africa to decolonization. This dataset, unique in scope and detail, provides a foundational empirical basis for analyzing how the colonial state’s reach evolved spatially and for tracing the historical origins of modern states’ capacity. We then link colonial-era violence and investments, which often shaped the economic activity hubs at independence, to the present-day variation in governance quality, trust, local conflict, and economic activity to understand why certain areas remain under-provided with public goods and prone to instability, while convergence-style growth with structural transformation has emerged in some other places. By tracing how the colonial legacy shaped today’s uneven state capacity across Africa, the study helps identify where aid and infrastructure investments are most likely to succeed—or fail—given long-run institutional and economic paradigm legacies. Besides, the new dataset provides a toolkit for targeting interventions toward historically under-administered, conflict-prone regions, designing programs to build much-needed state capacity, rebuilding the state’s legitimacy, and avoiding the reproduction of colonial patterns of neglect.