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In this article we reassess the role of ethnic favoritism in sub-Saharan Africa. Using data from 18 African countries, we study how the primary education and infant mortality of ethnic groups were affected by changes in the ethnicity of the countries’ leaders during the last 50 years. Our results indicate that the effects of ethnic favoritism are large and widespread, thus providing support for ethnicity-based explanations of Africa's underdevelopment. We also conduct a cross-country analysis of ethnic favoritism in Africa. We find that ethnic favoritism is less prevalent in countries with one dominant religion. In addition, our evidence suggests that stronger fiscal capacity may have enabled African leaders to provide more ethnic favors in education but not in infant mortality. Finally, political factors, linguistic differences, and patterns of ethnic segregation are found to be poor predictors of ethnic favoritism.

We empirically assess the possibility, stressed by African scholars, that stronger precolonial political institutions allowed colonial and postcolonial African governments to better implement modernization programs in rural areas. Using anthropological data, we document a strong positive association between the provision of public goods such as education, health, and infrastructure in African countries and the centralization of their ethnic groups' precolonial institutions. We develop an empirical test to distinguish among alternative explanations for this finding. The evidence Supports the view that precolonial centralization improved public goods provision by increasing the accountability of local Chiefs. Our results stress the importance for developing countries to create mechanisms to monitor local administrators of public projects. These mechanisms should be consistent with these countries' preexisting and informal arrangements.

Is African politics characterized by concentrated power in the hands of a narrow group (ethnically determined) that then fluctuates from one extreme to another via frequent coups? Employing data on the ethnicity of cabinet ministers since independence, we show that African ruling coalitions are surprisingly large and that political power is allocated proportionally to population shares across ethnic groups. This holds true even restricting the analysis to the subsample of the most powerful ministerial posts. We argue that the likelihood of revolutions from outsiders and coup threats from insiders are major forces explaining allocations within these regimes. Alternative allocation mechanisms are explored. Counterfactual experiments that shed light on the role of Western policies in affecting African national coalitions and leadership group premia are performed.

To what extent do politicians reward voters who are members of their own ethnic or racial group? Using data from large cities in the United States, we study how black employment outcomes are affected by changes in the race of the cities' mayors between 1973 and 2004. We find that relative to whites, black employment and labor force participation rise, and the black unemployment rate falls, during the tenure of black mayors. Black employment gains in municipal government jobs are particularly large, which suggests that our results capture causal effects of black mayors. Black mayors also lead to higher black incomes relative to white incomes. We show that our results continue to hold when we compare the treated cities to alternative control groups of cities, explicitly control for changing attitudes towards blacks or use regression discontinuity analysis to compare cities that elected black and white mayors in close elections.

The study of autocracies and weakly institutionalized countries is plagued by scarcity of information about the relative strength of different players within the political system. This paper presents novel data on the composition of government coalitions in a sample of fifteen post-colonial African countries suited to this task. We emphasize the role of the executive branch as the central fulcrum of all national political systems in our sample, especially relative to other institutional bodies such as the legislative assembly. Leveraging on the impressive body of work documenting the crucial role of ethnic fragmentation as a main driver of political and social friction in Africa, the paper further details the construction of ethnic composition measures for executive cabinets. We discuss how this novel source of information may help shed light on the inner workings of typically opaque African political elites.

Working Paper No. 20216 We posit the problem of an autocrat who has to allocate access to the executive positions in his inner circle and define the career profile of his own insiders. Statically, granting access to an executive post to a more experienced subordinate increases political returns to the post, but is more threatening to the leader in case of a coup. Dynamically, the leader monitors the capacity of staging a coup by his subordinates, which grows over time, and the incentives of trading a subordinate's own position for a potential shot at the leadership, which defines the incentives of staging a palace coup for each member of the inner circle. We map these theoretical elements into structurally estimable hazard functions of terminations of cabinet ministers for a panel of postcolonial Sub-Saharan African countries. The hazard functions initially increase over time, indicating that most government insiders quickly wear out their welcome, and then drop once the minister is fully entrenched in the current regime. We argue that the survival concerns of the leader in granting access to his inner circle can cover much ground in explaining the widespread lack of competence of African governments and the vast heterogeneity of political performance between and within these regimes.

This paper presents new evidence on the power sharing layout of national political elites in a panel of African countries, most of them autocracies. We present a model of coalition formation across ethnic groups and structurally estimate it employing data on the ethnicity of cabinet ministers since independence. As opposed to the view of a single ethnic elite monolithically controlling power, we show that African ruling coalitions are large and that political power is allocated proportionally to population shares across ethnic groups. This holds true even restricting the analysis to the subsample of the most powerful ministerial posts. We argue that the likelihood of revolutions from outsiders and the threat of coups from insiders are major forces explaining such allocations. Further, over-representation of the ruling ethnic group is quantitatively substantial, but not different from standard formateur premia in parliamentary democracies. We explore theoretically how proportional allocation for the elites of each group may still result in misallocations in the non-elite population.

This dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 studies the modern impact of pre-colonial centralization in Africa. Using anthropological data we find that centralized pre-colonial political institutions fostered the provision of public goods such as education, health and infrastructure in colonial and post-colonial Africa. Historical evidence suggests that the main virtue of centralized polities was greater accountability of local chiefs, disciplined by competition for higher office. In a model we show how centralization can expand the political arena and reduce local capture by boosting competition among entrenched local elites. We estimate the model and provide evidence consistent with our view that increased accountability was a major benefit of indigenous centralization in Africa. Chapter 2 provides a theoretical analysis of state-society relations. The economic literature on interest groups views the state as an arena within which societal interests compete to shape public policy. We argue instead that it is a key function of the state to actively shape society by organizing some social forces (but not others) into pressure groups. We construct a theoretical framework in which state elites decide which groups to mobilize, bargain with them and use them to effectively implement enacted policies. We show that the state faces two conflicting incentives. To extract more rents through policy mediation, it wants to organize the winners and disorganize the lasers from a given policy. On the other hand, broadening overall political participation allows the state to extort more resources by playing the competing interests against each other. The state's support for unbalanced organizational patterns induces highly redistributive but inefficient policies, whereas its desire for social mobilization is efficiency enhancing. Chapter 3 shows that despite the fact that the Americans living in low-unemployment states tend to trust each other more than those residing in high-unemployment regions, there is no evidence of the causal effect of local economic conditions on interpersonal trust. Changes in unemployment rate, speed of employment growth or growth rate of real wages do not seem to affect the degree of trust between people. In contrast, I find strong effect of unemployment rate on confidence in banks and financial institutions. By showing that this relationship is stronger for low-education and low-income individuals I dismiss potential reverse causality story and conclude that higher unemployment causes a decline in confidence in financial institutions and not vice-versa.

In this paper we reassess the role of ethnic favoritism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using data from 18 African countries, we study how primary education and infant mortality of ethnic groups were affected by changes in the ethnicity of the countries' leaders during the last fifty years. Our results indicate that the effects of ethnic favoritism are large and widespread, thus providing support for ethnicity-based explanations of Africa's underdevelopment. We also conduct a crosscountry analysis of ethnic favoritism in Africa. We find that ethnic favoritism is less prevalent in countries with one dominant religion. In addition, our evidence suggests that stronger fiscal capacity may have enabled African leaders to provide more ethnic favors in education but not in infant mortality. Finally, political factors, linguistic differences and patterns of ethnic segregation are found to be poor predictors of ethnic favoritism.