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We measure the impact of increasing integration between rural villages and outside labor markets. Seasonal flash floods cause exogenous and unpredictable loss of market access. We study the impact of new bridges that eliminate this risk. Identification exploits variation in riverbank characteristics that preclude bridge construction in some villages, despite similar need. We collect detailed annual household surveys over three years, and weekly telephone followups to study contemporaneous effects of flooding. Floods decrease labor market income by 18 percent when no bridge is present. Bridges eliminate this effect. The indirect effects on labor market choice, farm investment, and savings are quantitatively important and consistent with the predictions of a general equilibrium model in which farm investment is risky, and households manage labor market risk and agricultural risk simultaneously. In the calibrated model, the increase in consumption-equivalent welfare is substantially larger than the increase in income due to the ability to mitigate risk.

Decolonization in East Africa was a regional affair that required the remaking of temporal orders. The staggered independence timelines of Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya caused considerable consternation due to transnational solidarities and visions for East African Federation. The interminable delays of Kenyan decolonization also threatened the linked economy of the region and diluted the sovereignty of neighboring states. At issue was “liminal sovereignty,” with polities and people languishing between normative legal orders. Against expectations about self-determination, East Africans found themselves in partial control of their collective endeavors. I analyze the tactics of temporal activism by Africans who aimed to undo British control over the pacing, sequencing, and synchronicity of decolonization. The indeterminate geography of decolonization was linked to uncertain temporalities of independence which threatened to subvert self-determination. In East Africa, federation was a style of claims-making and chronopolitics intended to orchestrate the distribution of rights, resources, and authority in a new layering of sovereignty between postcolonies.

In 1975, the Ugandan state established an Economic Crimes Tribunal to investigate and penalize smuggling, hoarding, overcharging, and other commercial malfeasance. In the coming years, innumerable Ugandans were arrested and charged with contravening the state's economic regulations. Prior observers have seen this as another instance of a capricious state, but in this article, I demonstrate the popular investment in economic regulation. Ugandans demanded better stewardship of money and things because they were aghast at the ungovernable world of commodities. For one thing, the inaccessibility of so-called “essential commodities” — sugar and salt, preeminently — impeded ethical expectations surrounding social reproduction, hospitality, and masculine respectability. More troubling, essential commodities were not completely unavailable; rather, they were available on exclusionary and confusing terms. Relative deprivation was more upsetting than absolute scarcity because it offended a sense of consumptive entitlement. As a result, it was not only the state that accused citizens of economic crimes. There were widespread accusations in which allegation and denunciation circulated among neighbors, families, and bureaucrats in an urgent effort to discipline commodities and people.

This article examines the ambiguities of arbitrage, focusing on illegal coffee trade across the Uganda-Kenya border. I show how residents of the borderlands harnessed ordinary tools (gunny sacks, tin cans, and gravity scales) and cultural repertoires (kinship, language, and ritual) to cultivate and capitalize on difference. They reworked territorial jurisdiction, measurement standards, and surface appearances in a form of arbitrage known as magendo. While magendo is an ordinary occurrence at the border, I focus on a particular period in which magendo reached spectacular new levels. The resulting binge economy was characterized by competitive gift-giving and interethnic conviviality, but its excessive margins eventually challenged prevailing notions of moral selfhood, gender relations, and the authority of elder men. Seeing arbitrage not merely as the reserve of high finance but also as a strategy of African frontiers provides a way to connect the anthropology of finance to enduring concerns around the postcolonial politics of borders, gerontocracy, and value. Nakala hii inachunguza utata wa arbitrage. Maandishi yangu yanazingatia biashara wa kahawa mpakani mwa Kenya na Uganda. Katika nakala hii, ninaonyesha jinsi wakazi wa mipakani walitumia zana za kila siku (magunia, madebe, na mizani) na pia mbinu za kitamaduni (ukoo, lugha, na mila) kuzalisha na kukuza tofauti za kisokoni na faida. Aidha wahusika hawa walipinda na kufinyanga dhana kuhusu udhibiti wa mipaka, desturi za kukadiri, na muonekano wa nje kwa kupitia kitendo cha arbitrage: almaarufu kama magendo. Ingawa uchukuzi magendo si taratibu geni kwa uchumi za mipakani, nakala hii inazingatia wakati ambapo uchuuzi wa kahawa ulifikia kilele cha kustaajabisha na kuleta uchumi wa ukwasi. Kwa upande moja msimu huo ulileta urafiki kati ya jamii tofauti na mienendo kama vile mashindano ya kutunukiana zawadi. Kwa upande mwingine, faida za kiajabu ziliibua miangalio mipya kuhusu maswala ya uadilifubinafsi, jinsia katika jamii, na mamlaka ya wazee. Kuelewa arbitrage kama zaidi ya mazoezi ya kifedha, bali pia kama mkakati wa uchumi za mapembezoni, inatupa njia ya kuunganisha anthropolojia ya fedha na masawali ya mipaka baada ya ukoloni, utawala wa wakongwe, na thamani.

The in situ determination of the size distribution of dispersed non-spherical nanoparticles is an essential characterization tool for the investigation and use of colloidal suspensions. In this work, we test a size characterization method based on the measurement of the transient behaviour of the birefringence induced in the dispersions by pulsed electric fields. The specific shape of such relaxations depends on the distribution of the rotational diffusion coefficient of the suspended particles. We analyse the measured transient birefringence with three approaches: the stretched-exponential, Watson-Jennings, and multi-exponential methods. These are applied to six different types of rod-like and planar particles: PTFE rods, goethite needles, single- and double-walled carbon nanotubes, sodium montmorillonite particles and gibbsite platelets. The results are compared to electron microscopy and dynamic light scattering measurements. The methods here considered provide good or excellent results in all cases, proving that the analysis of the transient birefringence is a powerful tool to obtain complete size distributions of non-spherical particles in suspension.

I consider the aggregate impact of low intermediate input intensity in the agricultural sector of developing countries. In a dynamic general equilibrium model with idiosyncratic shocks, incomplete markets, and subsistence requirements, farmers in developing countries use fewer intermediate inputs because it limits their exposure to uninsurable shocks. The calibrated model implies that Indian agricultural productivity would increase by 16% if markets were complete, driven by quantitatively important increases in both the average real intermediate share and measured TFP through lower misallocation. I then extend the results to consider the importance of risk in other contexts. First, the introduction of insurance decreases cross-country differences in agricultural labour productivity by 14%. Second, scaling the introduction of improved seeds to decrease downside risk reduces inequality by reallocating resources from rich to poor farmers via equilibrium effects. This reallocation substantially increases aggregate productivity relative to what would be expected from extrapolating the partial equilibrium impact.

Starting in March 2012, the South African government engaged in a massive effort of citizen registration that continued for more than a year. Nearly 19 million social welfare beneficiaries enrolled in a novel biometric identification scheme that uses fingerprints and voice recognition to authenticate social grant recipients. This article seeks to understand the meaning of biometric technology in post-apartheid South African welfare through a study of the bureaucratic and policy elite's motivation. It argues that biometric technology was conceived of and implemented as the most recent in a series of institutional, infrastructural and policy reforms that seek to deliver welfare in a standardised and objective manner. This has, at times, been driven by a false faith in technical efficacy and has involved a playing down of the differential political implications of biometric welfare identification.

We use a randomized controlled trial to demonstrate that inexperienced female microenterprise owners in a Kenyan slum benefit from mentorship by an experienced entrepreneur in the same community. Mentorship increases profits by 20 percent on average with initially large effects that fade as matches dissolve. We conduct a formal business education intervention, which has no effect on profits despite changes in business practice. Our results demonstrate that missing information is a salient barrier to profitability, but the type of information matters: access to the localized, specific knowledge of mentors increases profit while abstract, general information from the class does not.