TY  - JOUR
AU  - Michalopoulos,Stelios
AU  - Papaioannou,Elias
TI  - Divide and Rule or the Rule of the Divided? Evidence from Africa
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 17184
PY  - 2011
Y2  - June 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17184
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17184.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Stelios Michalopoulos
Brown University
Department of Economics
64 Waterman Street
Providence, RI 02912
Tel: 401/863-2506
Fax: 401/863-1970
E-Mail: smichalo@brown.edu

Elias Papaioannou
London Business School
Regent's Park
Sussex Place
London NW1 4SA
United Kingdom
Tel:  +44 (0) 207000 8432
Fax: +44 (0) 207000 8401
E-Mail: papaioannou.elias@gmail.com
AB  - We investigate jointly the importance of contemporary country-level institutional structures and local ethnic-specific pre-colonial institutions in shaping comparative regional development in Africa. We utilize information on the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization and regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as proxied by satellite light density at night. We exploit the fact that political boundaries across the African landscape partitioned ethnic groups in different countries subjecting identical cultures to different country-level institutions. Our regression discontinuity estimates reveal that differences in countrywide institutional arrangements across the border do not explain differences in economic performance within ethnic groups. In contrast, we document a strong association between pre-colonial ethnic institutional traits and contemporary regional development. While this correlation does not necessarily identify a causal relationship, this result obtains conditional on country fixed-effects, controlling for other ethnic traits and when we focus on pairs of contiguous ethnic homelands.
ER  -