Nik Stoop

To fish or not to fish? Resource degradation and income diversification in Benin

This paper looks at the relationship between natural resource degradation and income diversification for fishing communities in southern Benin. We find that the higher the degradation of the fishery stock, the more fishers diversify their income away from the fishery sector. However, given the rapid natural resource degradation, the level of income diversification that we find is surprisingly low and far from sufficient to relieve the stress on the lakes. In explaining the low level of income diversification, our results suggest that education plays a role.

More legislation, more violence? The impact of Dodd-Frank in the DRC

The Dodd Frank Act was passed by the US Congress in July 2010 and included a provision—Section 1502—that aimed to break the link between conflict and minerals in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. To date there is only one rigorous quantitative analysis that investigates the impact of Dodd-Frank on local conflict events. Looking at the short-term impact (2011–2012), it finds that the policy backfired. This study builds on a larger, more representative, dataset of mining sites and extends the time horizon by three years (2013–2015). The results indicate that the policy also backfired in the longer run, especially in areas home to gold mines. For territories with the average number of gold mines, the introduction of Dodd-Frank increased the incidence of battles with 44%; looting with 51% and violence against civilians with 28%, compared to pre-Dodd Frank averages. Delving deeper into the impact of the conflict minerals legislation is important, as President Trump suspended the legislation in February 2017 for a two-year period, ordering his administration to replace it with another policy.

Voodoo, vaccines and bed nets

We provide the first quantitative analysis to scrutinize the ample ethnographic evidence that magico-religious beliefs affect the demand for conventional health care in sub-Saharan Africa. We rely on the unique case of Benin, where Voodoo adherence is freely reported and varies greatly within villages and even within households yet can be traced to historic events that are arguably exogenous to present-day health-care behavior. These features allow us to account for confounding village and household factors and address self-selection into Voodoo. We find that Voodoo adherence of the mother is associated with lower uptake of preventive health-care measures and worse child health outcomes.