We discuss recent work evaluating the role of the government in shaping the economy
during the long nineteenth century, a practice we refer to as industrial policy. States …

Forced displacement as a consequence of wars, civil conflicts, or natural disasters does not
only have contemporaneous consequences but also long‐run repercussions. This eclectic …

We examine intergenerational mobility (IM) in educational attainment in Africa since
independence using census data. First, we map IM across 27 countries and more than 2800 …

Africa is rising, but IB scholars have largely failed to take notice. We argue that this is a
missed opportunity. Not only is Africa a dynamic and distinctive region, but its rise presents a …

All colonial powers granted concessions to private companies to extract natural resources
during the colonial era. In Africa, these concessions were characterized by indirect rule and …

Behavioral genetics and cultural evolution have both revolutionized our understanding of
human behavior–largely independent of each other. Here, we reconcile these two fields …

This article studies the role of political distortions in driving economic growth and
development in Africa. We first discuss how existing theories based on long-run structural …

This paper discusses the rise to prominence of persistence studies, defined as studies that
use quantitative causal inference to link past events with later economic and political …

African colonial history suggests that British colonial rule may have undermined state
centralisation due to legacies of ethnic segregation and stronger executive constraints …

The relationship between relation-based governance and economic growth has drawn
much academic attention; however, previous studies have not fully recognized the causal …