Matthias Cinyabuguma

Cooperation Under the Threat of Expulsion in a Public Goods Experiment

In a public goods experiment with the opportunity to vote to expel members of a group, we found that contributions rose to nearly 100% of endowments with significantly higher efficiency compared with a coexpulsion baseline. Expulsions were strictly of the lowest contributors, and there was an exceptionally strong fall-off in contributions in the last period, when the expulsion threat was unavailable. Our findings support the intuition that the threat of expulsion or ostracism is one device that helps groups to provide public goods.

URBAN GROWTH EXTERNALITIES AND NEIGHBORHOOD INCENTIVES: ANOTHER CAUSE OF URBAN SPRAWL?*

This paper suggests a cause of low density urban development or urban sprawl that has not been given much attention in the literature. There have been a number of arguments put forward for market failures that may account for urban sprawl, including incomplete pricing of infrastructure, environmental externalities, and unpriced congestion. The problem analyzed here is that urban growth creates benefits for an entire urban area, but the costs of growth are borne by individual neighborhoods. An externality problem arises because existing residents perceive the costs associated with the new residents locating in their neighborhoods, but not the full benefits of new entrants which accrue to the city as a whole. The result is that existing residents have an incentive to block new residents to their neighborhoods, resulting in cities that are less dense than is optimal, or too spread out. The paper models several different types of urban growth, and examines the optimal and local choice outcomes under each type. In the first model, population growth is endogenous and the physical limits of the city are fixed. The second model examines the case in which population growth in the region is given, but the city boundary is allowed to vary. We show that in both cases the city will tend to be larger and less dense than is optimal. In each, we examine the sensitivity of the model to the number of neighborhoods and to the size of infrastructure and transportation costs. Finally, we examine optimal subsidies and see how they compare to current policies such as impact fees on new development.

Sources of Growth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: A Cointegration Approach

The paper investigates the sources of growth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1960 and evaluates the relative importance of total factor productivity growth and factor accumulation, using a cointegration method and a growth accounting framework. The main findings confirm that poor economic policies and bad governance (through their effects on total factor productivity and capital accumulation) contributed to the country`s economic decline during the 40-year period, 1960-2000. Looking forward, the paper finds that the right policies are being put in place to pave the way for a restoration of economic growth.

Sub-Saharan Growth Surprises: Geography, Institutions and History in an All African Data Panel

We use two sets of cross-country growth regression models to investigate the determinants of the growth rates in African countries between 1960 and 2000. Both sets of models contradict conclusions based on global samples: within Africa, we find greater coastal population and distance from the equator unhelpful and greater ethnic heterogeneity helpful to growth. Our results confirm the negative effects of corruption and civil wars and the positive effects of trade openness, political rights and political openness, and suggest that these institutional and policy variables are endogenous to geographic and historical factors including the colonizing power and the religious and ethnic make-up of the country.

Financial Development and Pre-Historic Geographical Isolation: Global Evidence

Using cross-country differences in the degree of isolation before the advent of technologies in sea and air transportation, we assess the relationship between geographic isolation and financial development across the globe. We find that pre-historic geographical isolation has been beneficial to development because it has contributed to contemporary cross-country differences in financial intermediary development. The relationship is robust to alternative samples, different estimation techniques, outliers and varying conditioning information sets. The established positive relationship between geographic isolation and financial intermediary development does not significantly extend to stock market development.

Leveraging the potential of the services sector to support accelerated growth in Senegal

Services play a major role in the Senegalese economy, accounting for 66 percent of economic activity and contributing nearly three-quarters of gross domestic product growth between 2006 and 2013. During the period, the private sector contributed 71 percent of services and accounted for 84 percent of its contribution to growth. The dynamism of private services is driven primarily by telecommunications and financial services: while the two sub-sectors made up 21 percent of private services, they accounted for nearly half (48 percent) of the contributions of private services to growth during the period. These trends are projected to improve in the future. Available data on employment and credit confirm the critical importance of services. In 2013, over 50 percent of credit to the economy was devoted to services, and 55 percent of the labor force was employed in the services sector, including 36 percent of the rural workforce and as much as 80 percent of the urban workforce.

Financial development and prehistoric geographical isolation: global evidence

Using cross-country differences in the degree of isolation before the advent of technologies in sea and air transportation, we assess the relationship between geographic isolation and financial development across the globe. We find that pre-historic geographical isolation has been beneficial to development because it has contributed to contemporary cross-country differences in financial intermediary development. The relationship is robust to alternative samples, different estimation techniques, outliers and varying conditioning information sets. The established positive relationship between geographic isolation and financial intermediary development does not significantly extend to stock market development.

Financial Development and Geographic Isolation: Global Evidence

Using cross-country differences in the degree of isolation before the advent of technologies in sea and air transportation, we assess the relationship between geographic isolation and financial development across the globe. We find that pre-historic geographical isolation has been beneficial to development because it has contributed to contemporary cross-country differences in financial development. The relationship is robust to alternative samples, different estimation techniques, outliers and varying conditioning information sets.

Explaining the Revolution in U.S. Fertility, Schooling, and Women’s Work among Households Formed in 1875, 1900, and 1925

Abstract This paper addresses revolutionary changes in the education, fertility and market work of U.S. families formed in the 1870s–1920s: Fertility fell from 5.3 to 2.6; the graduation rate of their children increased from 7% to 50%; and the fraction of adulthood wives devoted to market-oriented work increased from 7% to 23% (by one measure). These trends are addressed within a unified framework to examine the ability of several proposed mechanisms to quantitatively replicate these changes. Based on careful calibration, the choices of successive generations of representative husband-and-wife households over the quantity and quality of their children, household production, and the extent of mother’s involvement in market-oriented production are simulated. Rising wages, declining mortality, a declining gender wage gap, and increased efficiency and public provision of schooling cannot, individually or in combination, reduce fertility or increase stocks of human capital to levels seen in the data. The best fit of the model to the data also involves: (1) a decreased tendency among parents to view potential earnings of children as the property of parents and (2) rising consumption shares per dependent child. Greater attention should be given the determinants of parental control of the work and earnings of children for this period. One contribution is the gathering of information and strategies necessary to establish an initial baseline, and the time paths for parameters and targets for this period beset with data limitations. A second contribution is identifying the contributions of various mechanisms toward reaching those calibration targets.