Works in Progress


Missionary Legacies of Gender Equality: Multidimensional Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa (with Bastian Becker) 

[Working Paper]  Submitted

We study the long-term effects of Christian missionary activity in colonial Africa on present-day gender equality in relation to human capital, labor market participation, and norms. Novel historical data on the location of main missions, and the gender composition of their staff, is analyzed in combination with contemporary survey data on over one million respondents in 29 sub-Saharan countries. We find that colonial-era missions are associated with (i) greater present-day gender equality in human capital and (ii) more gender equal norms but (iii) have no effect on gender gaps in labor market participation. These effects are independent of Christian denominational differences as well as the presence of female missionaries (earliest centres of female education), whose initial positive effects on early colonial female education dissipated in the long-run. Our findings are robust across numerous specifications, historical and modern control variables, sample restrictions, birth cohorts, and spatial estimation strategies.


Shifting Opportunities and Gender Inequality in British Colonial Africa? Evidence from Urban Christian Converts (with Jacob Weisdorf) 

[Working Paper]

Abstract: Christian missionary activities in colonial Africa have been praised for their comparatively benign effects on current African development. But to what extent were African men and women actually able to benefit from these developments during colonial times? Using educational and occupational statistics derived from 30,000 marriage registers obtained from six major cities in British Africa, we study the long-term comparative development of occupational structures and gender inequality in colonial labour markets of African women and men deeply entrenched with the missionary movement. We show how early-colonial mission education helped African men access formal labour, while women were relegated to informal and homemaking activities instead, even if mission schooling facilitated their social mobility via marriage. The early colonial rise in gender inequality was followed by a remarkable decline herein post-World War II,  caused  by the expansion, Africanization and feminization of the civil service. The gender gap in labour force participation was remarkably mirrored among British settler couples, thus reflecting female emancipatory trends more globally. This process was relatively faster in West Africa where women’s precolonial tradition of economic independence and entrepreneurship contested colonial ideals of domestic virtue.


Husbands and Wives: The Powers and Perils of Women’s Participation in a Coffee Cooperative from Rural Uganda (with Carla Canelas Tobar and Erik Stam)  R&R Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development

[Paper] 

Abstract: Combining access to both capital and commodity markets, mixed cooperatives have been identified as a means to empower women’s social and economic position in developing economies. Using survey data on 607 married female smallholders in rural Uganda and matching methods to correct for endogeneity, we investigate whether women’s participation in a coffee and microfinance (mixed) cooperative benefits household incomes and their household decision-making power and savings. Building on a previous literature of female microfinance borrowers and intra-household frictions, we also study whether husbands’ participation in their wives’ cooperative and self-help group affects women’s empowerment. We find that women’s participation in cooperatives remains a conditional blessing: even though it strengthens women’s intra-household decision-making and raises both household savings and income from coffee sales, women’s bargaining power diminishes when their husband is a member of the same self-help group. Our analysis therefore suggests that including husbands in cooperatives’ self-help groups may not be perceived as an attractive option for female smallholders.


Africa’s Mineral Transition in Historical Perspective: Missed Opportunity or Blessing in Disguise? (with Ewout Frankema)

The substitution of minerals for tropical agricultural exports were the game-changer in economic specialization patterns of post-colonial Africa. Compared to economic historical research on the 19th century commercial transition, this ‘mineral transition’ remains greatly understudied. An extensively updated version of the African Commodity Trade Database (ACTD 2.0) enables us to explore Africa’s mineral transition in a long-term perspective. Exploiting the fact that about half of African countries south of the Sahara experienced this transition, while the other half retained its ‘traditional’ crop-based export package, we focus on three key dimensions of the transition: (i) long-term prices and terms-of-trade; (ii) economic growth and poverty reduction; (iii) the political economy of the fiscal state: did mineral export revenues crowd-out existing agricultural exports as the latter sector’s fiscal significance declined, or were revenues used to revitalize the agricultural sector? Our evidence supports a nuanced narrative that emphasises both missed opportunities of rural development and pro-poor growth, but also  points to the gloomy counterfactual offered by economies that have not undergone a mineral transition (yet).


Crops, Prices or Policies? Commodity Exports in British and French West Africa (with Michiel de Haas, Ewout Frankema & Federico Tadei)

Abstract: African terms of trade (export/import prices) peaked around the time of the colonial scramble in the 1880s before starting a precipitous decline that lasted until the mid-20th century (Frankema et al. 2018). The declining terms of trade had a major impact on African economies, which were highly reliant on export agriculture. Still, the effect seems to have been different in British and French colonies. Preliminary evidence suggests that the decline in terms of trade was more severe in French West Africa than in British West Africa. Moreover, in British West Africa, the declining terms of trade were compensated with faster increases in the volume of exports compared to French West Africa. In this paper, we investigate the timing and drivers of this decline and explore the reasons for the diverging trajectories by evaluating three hypotheses. First, we explore commodity-specific explanations for a decline in the numerator (export prices), such as competition with Asia for rubber and palm oil, rapid production increases of cocoa in the market-leading economies of Ghana and Nigeria, and competition from non-tropical producers of cotton and groundnuts. Second, we consider how export prices were affected by trade policies related to dynamics both in the metropoles (industrial demand) and the colonies (colonial taxation, market power of trading companies, reaction of African producers) and we look at the ‘denominator’ (import prices) to see how changes in the composition and origin of manufactured imports influenced the differential trend in terms of trades. Third, we look at the ecological conditions to expand existing and/or develop new export crop production systems.


Ongoing Research