Jean-François Maystadt

Winners and Losers Among a Refugee-Hosting Population

The impact of a sudden, mass influx of forced migrants on the hosting economy is understudied and not well understood. Using a household panel data set for the Kagera region in Tanzania, we test the impact of the mass refugee presence on the welfare of the local population. Our identification strategy exploits variations in the timing of arrival as well as the spatial distribution of Rwandese and Burundi refugees. We find a positive and aggregate effect, but households are affected differently depending on their main initial occupation.

Environmental Migration and Labor Markets in Nepal

While an emerging literature cites weather shocks as migration determinants, scant evidence exists on how such migration affects the markets of receiving communities in developing countries. We address this knowledge gap by investigating the impact of weather-driven internal migration on labor markets in Nepal. An increase of 1 percentage point in net migration reduces wages in the formal sector by 5.7%. A similar change in migration augments unemployment by 1 percentage point. The unskilled bear greater consequences. Understanding entrepreneurial constraints and drivers of labor market exits will inform pathways to resilience.

Extreme Weather and Civil War in Somalia: Does Drought Fuel Conflict through Livestock Price Shocks?

Climate change leads to more frequent and more intense droughts in Somalia. In a global context, weather shocks have been found to perpetuate poverty and fuel civil conflict. By relating regional and temporal variations in violent conflict outbreaks with drought incidence and severity, we show that this causality is valid also for Somalia at the local level. We find that livestock price shocks drive drought-induced conflicts through reducing the opportunity costs of conflict participation. Our estimation results indicate that a temperature rise of around 3.2 degrees Celsius—corresponding to the median Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenario for eastern Africa by the end of the century—would lower cattle prices by about 4 percent and, in turn, increase the incidence of violent conflict by about 58 percent. Hence climate change will further aggravate Somalia’s security challenges and calls for decisive action to strengthen both drought and conflict resilience, especially in pastoralist and agropastoralist livelihoods.

Violence, selection and infant mortality in Congo

This paper documents the effects of the recent civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo on mortality both in utero and during the first year of life. It instruments for conflict intensity using a mineral price index, which exploits the exogenous variation in the potential value of mineral resources generated by changes in world mineral prices to predict the geographic distribution of the conflict. Using estimates of civil war exposure on mortality across male and female newborn to assess their relative health, it provides evidence of culling effect (in utero selection) as a consequence of in utero shocks.

Essays on the political economy of development in Nigeria

This thesis consists of an introductory chapter, which situate the central theme of the dissertation within the intellectual frontier of political economy of development, and three distinct but related essays that addresses issues affecting the economic and political development of Nigeria. The first essay examines the political economy of intergovernmental transfers in Nigeria. Using oil windfalls as a source of exogenous variation in the political discretion an incumbent government can exert in rule-based transfers, I showed that an increase in VAT transfers induced by higher oil windfalls improves the electoral fortune of an incumbent government in the Presidential elections. This result questions the promotion of rule-based transfers as a one-fits-all institutional solution in resource-abundant countries with relatively weak institutions. The second essay exploits climatic data to study how resource inequality between ethnic groups affects the risk of violent conflicts within Nigeria. The main results show that a one standard deviation change in between-group rainfall inequality during the growing season increase the risks of civil conflicts prevalence in Nigeria by about seven percentage points. This relationship is driven, in part, by declining social capital. Specifically, I demonstrated that an unequal distribution of rainfall between ethnic groups reinforce citizen’s grievances over the government performance and creates mistrust between predominantly farming communities and those engaged in nomadic herding. The analysis highlights the need to develop conflict-sensitive mitigation and adaptation strategies to reduce the adverse effects of climatic shocks. The third essay evaluates how different punishment mechanisms may affect the incidence of bribe requests and payments. The analysis is based on a dynamic game in which the bureaucrat moves first and decides whether to solicits for bribe or not. Conditional on agents accepting to bribe, harsher punishment for corrupt bureaucrat incentivize him to angle for a larger bribe to compensate for the higher risks. I show that the effects of a switch from a fixed punishment mechanism to a proportional one that varies with the size of the bribe depend on how much effort is needed to deliver the public service. Where the delivery of public service requires much effort, the bribe becomes too expensive that only agent with larger opportunity cost of time would engage in bribing. The essay discuss the implications of the results on willingness to pay and inequality.

Is environmentally induced income variability a driver of human migration

The role of environmentally induced income variability as a determinant of migration has been studied little to none. We provide a theoretical discussion based on a ‘risk aversion channel’ and an overview of the empirical literature on this. We also extend a previous empirical study on 39 sub-Saharan African countries with yearly data from 1960 to 2000 by including income variability and its weather determinants. Our findings lead us to acknowledge that, based on our dataset and methodology, income variability is a negligible driver of migration decisions at the macroeconomic level.