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We examine the determinants of time allocation and child labour in a year-long panel of time-use data from colonial Nigeria. Using quantitative and ethnographic approaches, we show that health shocks imposed time costs on individuals. Whether individuals could recruit substitutes depended on social standing, urgency of work, and type of illness. Child labour did not systematically respond to temporary parental illness, but could replace a permanently disabled adult. Child labour was coordinated with parental work, aided childcare, and allowed children to build skills and resources. These decisions can be understood within an endogenous bargaining power framework with labour complementarities.

Jülich : Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Zentralbibliothek, Schriften des Forschungszentrums Jülich. Reihe Allgemeines 8, 197 Seiten : Illustrationen, Diagramme, Karten (2020)., Published by Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Zentralbibliothek, Jülich

The 8th international meeting of the Union for Compact Accelerator-Driven Neutron Sources (UCANS-8) was held in Paris, July 8–11, 2019. Over 140 participants from more than a dozen countries from v...

We study the origins of adult mental health using early life income fluctuations. Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we show that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early life decreases the likelihood of severe mental distress in adulthood by 3 percentage points (or half the mean prevalence) for cohorts born in cocoa-producing regions relative to other regions. Impacts on related personality traits are consistent with this result. Maternal nutrition, reinforcing childhood investments, and adult circumstance are operative channels of impact.

At the start of the Second World War, British policies restricted rubber planting in Nigeria’s Benin region. After Japan occupied Southeast Asia, Britain encouraged maximum production of rubber in Benin. Late in the war, officials struggled with the planting boom that had occurred. The war was a period of both continuity and change. Producers gained experience and capital. Forestry policies restricting planting survived, and output quality continued to occupy officials after the war. The colonial state was hindered by a lack of knowledge and resources, and by its pursuit of conflicting objectives in giving incentives to both producers and traders.

Although Nigeria’s Benin region was a major rubber producer in 1960, the industry developed slowly. The colonial government encouraged rubber production from 1897 until 1921, when it abandoned the industry as a failure. I explain why rubber did not take hold in this period. The government was unable to protect Benin’s rubber forests from over-exploitation. Expatriate firms were reticent to invest in plantations, and private African plantations remained small to 1921. The colonial government promoted the development of “communal” plantations, but these suffered from labor scarcity, a weak state, limited information, and global competition.

State capacity matters for growth. I test Bates' explanation of pre-colonial African states. He argues that trade across ecological boundaries promoted states. I find that African societies in ecologically diverse environments had more centralized states. This is robust to reverse causation, omitted heterogeneity, and alternative interpretations of the link between diversity and states. Ecological diversity also predicts states outside of Africa. I test mechanisms connecting trade to states, and find that trade supported class stratification between rulers and ruled. I underscore the importance of ethnic institutions and inform our knowledge of the effects of geography and trade on institutions.

The temperature-dependent magnetic structure of a 200 nm thick single-crystalline film of Fe50Pt40Rh10 was studied by unpolarized and polarized neutron diffractions. By applying structure factor calculations, a detailed model of the magnetic unit cell was developed. In contrast to former studies on bulk samples, our experimental results show that the film remains in an antiferromagnetic state throughout the temperature range of 10-450 K. Remarkably, it can be demonstrated that the antiferromagnetic structure undergoes a smooth transition from a dominant out-of-plane order with the magnetic moments orientated in-plane to an in-plane order with the magnetic moments orientated perpendicular to the film plane. Theoretically this can be explained by the existence of two competing anisotropy contributions with different temperature dependencies.

This thesis assesses how a large safety-net programme in rural Ethiopia affects local labour markets. Combining repeated cross-sections of the National Labour Force Survey with information on the geographical targeting of the programme, a differencein- differences approach is used to estimate whether employment outcomes have changed differently over time in targeted districts relative to those that did not receive the programme. The results suggest that a combination of public works employment and unconditional transfers to food-insecure households does not affect the local labour supply in this rural economy. I explore whether differential trends and population composition could explain these results, which are more likely due to programme design. Albeit scantily observed, the wages of private sector labourers also seem unaffected, in contrast to findings from similar studies focusing on labour markets from other developing countries outside Africa.

We show that the long-run consequences of historical warfare are different for Sub-Saharan Africa than for the rest of the Old World. We identify the locations of over 1,750 conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe from 1400 to 1799. We find that historical warfare predicts greater state capacity today across the Old World, including in Sub-Saharan Africa. There is no significant correlation between historical warfare and current civil conflicts across the rest of the Old World. However, this correlation is strong and positive in Sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, while a history of conflict predicts higher per capita GDP for the rest of the Old World, this positive consequence is overturned for Sub-Saharan Africa.

This thesis analyses the interaction between development and integration into global markets. Chapter 1 studies whether international crop prices affect formal land tenure in Uganda. Higher agricultural prices induce farmers to increase their share of titled land. This effect results from the combination of an income effect, an incentive effect, and the interaction between social status and social capital. Prices have a positive impact on agricultural income and sales revenues. The effect of prices on land tenure is stronger when farmers have undertaken investment on the land, for the prices of export crops, and when farmers fear expropriation and land grabbing. In areas with lower social capital, land insecurity is higher. Elite groups in low-social-capital communities respond more to an increase in prices, whereas disadvantaged groups are better-off where social capital is higher. Chapter 2 evaluates the adjustment cost to the DR-CAFTA free trade agreement in Honduras. The agreement produces a reduction in household income in Honduran regions more intensely exposed to trade. The result is driven by local labour market effects: workers are not able to relocate across locations or sectors, and a generalised reduction in wages pushes many out of the labour force or into less lucrative, informal-sector activities. Chapter 3 investigates the relationship between migrant remittances and financial development across Italian provinces in the late Nineteenth-early Twentieth centuries. Remittances have a positive impact on the growth of bank deposits. Higher remittances are associated with increased GDP and a higher number of active bank branches, and therefore contribute to enhancing financial inclusion. Chapter 4 is an empirical application of theoretical models of trade with product variety and firm heterogeneity, and measures the gains from trade predicted by these models for Italy between 1870 and 2000. The analysis accounts for gains from variety, firm selection effects, and technology spillovers, and allows the trade elasticity to vary over time, reflecting the main economic and political phases of Italian history.

This thesis investigates the causes of childhood outcomes. In Chapter 1, written with Elisabetta De Cao, we show that unemployment causes child neglect in the United States, during the period from 2004 to 2012. We identify this effect using a Bartik instrument, which we create by combining national-level unemployment rates across industries with differences in the initial industrial structure across counties. We find evidence that parents in the United States lack the social and private safety nets needed to provide for their children's basic needs in the event of a job loss. In Chapter 2, written with Sonia Bhalotra, we find that fathers work less after having a first born son rather than a daughter in the United Kingdom, during the period from 2009 to 2016. The effect occurs on both the extensive and intensive margins, and in the first year of the child's life. Our identification strategy exploits the randomness of the gender of the first child. We find evidence that degree educated fathers and their partners both take time off work to increase the total parental time invested in sons, because boys' development is less advanced than girls' development at a young age. We find evidence that non-degree educated fathers take time off work to reduce the burden of childcare on their partners, which helps their partners to return to work sooner after childbirth. Finally, in Chapter 3, I find that female leaders elected to the State Legislative Assembly improve child learning in their districts in rural India, during the period from 2008 to 2014. The effect occurs for both reading and mathematics, and the gender gap in mathematics narrows. To identify this effect, I instrument for the fraction of seats won by a woman in a district with the fraction of seats won by a woman in a close election against a man. The most plausible explanation for the effects is that female leaders try to improve educational outcomes around the time of an election, in the hope of re-election.

Economic prosperity across African countries has greatly diverged over the last decades. One the one end, countries like Botswana, Ethiopia and Rwanda have grown rapidly. Others, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are poorer in the 21st century than they were at independence. Growing evidence shows that a considerable share of this variation is explained by the presence of centralized precolonial polities within these countries (Michalopoulos & Papaiannou, 2013). In this thesis, I investigate whether there is an effect of having a tradition of statehood matters for development outcomes today. I also investigate potential mechanisms behind the effect of a longer tradition of statehood and ask if there are interaction effects between historical states and intermediate outcomes. I furthermore attempt to understand the effects of large-scale state intervention in the rural economy of England on industrialization. This dissertation, then, is a study of the role of the state in comparative economic development.

In this thesis, I analyse the impact of economic shocks on violence, and the mechanisms underlying them. I also investigate the long-term effects of violence on economic outcomes. In my first chapter, I introduce this thesis, and broadly outline its aims and contributions. In my second chapter, I examine lynchings of African Americans in the US South from 1882 to 1930, and show that cotton price shocks predict lynchings. Lynchings also predict more black out-migration from 1920 to 1930, and higher state-level wages. Using a simple model, I show that this is consistent with lynchings having labour market effects that benefitted whites: lynchings cause blacks to migrate away, lowering labour supply and increasing wages for white labourers. I then turn to the long-term effects of lynchings. I show that Mississippi counties with more violence during a 1964 Civil Rights campaign also had more lynchings during the earlier period. Finally, lynchings persist in labour market outcomes: present-day results show that lynchings predict higher black-white worker, family, and household income gaps. In my third chapter, I turn to FrenchWest Africa, a co-authored work with James Fenske. We show that rainfall, temperature, and commodity price shocks predict unrest in colonial French West Africa between 1906 and 1956. We use a simple model of taxation and anti-tax resistance to explain these results. In the colonial period, the response of unrest to economic shocks was strongest in more remote areas and those lacking a history of pre-colonial states. In modern data spanning 1997 to 2011, the effect of economic shocks on unrest is weaker. Past patterns of heterogeneity are no longer present. The response of unrest to economic shocks, then, differs across institutional contexts within a single location. In my fourth and last chapter, I find that favourable temperatures and favourable economic conditions predict more witchcraft trials in Early Modern Scotland (1563-1727), a largely agricultural economy. During this time, witchcraft was a secular crime, and it was incumbent on local elites to commit resources to trying witches. Consistent with this, I find that positive price shocks to export-heavy, taxable goods like herring and wool predict more witch trials, while price shocks to Scotland's main subsistence commodity, oats, do not.

This thesis presents research that subscribes to the broader theme of the Economic History of South Asia from 1891 to 2009. First, Chapter 2 shows that the Partition induced expulsion of religious minorities reduced school provision in Pakistan. The effect of minorities is explained by their education, occupational structure and their contribution towards local social capital. Then, Chapter 3 examines how areas affected by the Partition fare in terms of long-run agricultural development in India. It finds that areas that received more displaced migrants after Partition perform better in terms of crop yields, are more likely to take up of high yielding varieties (HYV) of seeds, and are more likely to use agricultural technologies. It highlights the superior educational status of the migrants as a potential pathway for the observed effects. Next, Chapter 4 shows that the agricultural productivity shock induced by the adoption of HYV of seeds reduced infant mortality across districts in India. It uses data on the characteristics of children and mothers in the sample to show that it was children born to mothers whose characteristics generally correlate with higher child mortality, children born in rural areas, boys, children born in rice and wheat producing districts and children born in poorer households who benefit more from HYV adoption. Furthermore, Chapter 5 shows that baseline differences in irrigation prior to the adoption of HYV are associated with differences in the growth of yields after adoption. It explores the relationship between irrigation and yields over time to uncover potential mechanisms for the observed relationship. Finally, Chapter 6 empirically investigates the relationship between religious shrines and literacy in the Punjab province of Pakistan.