Together with David Stadelmann

This article investigates the effect of women's schooling on fertility as well as on associated mechanisms by leveraging Burundi's free primary education policy (FPE) of 2005 as a natural experiment. Exogenous variation in schooling is identified through a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. Our results show that educational attainment was positively influenced by Burundi's FPE for women situated at all wealth levels. However, the relevant downstream effects of schooling—measured by fertility, literacy and work outcomes—reveal heterogenous treatment effects which are moderated by women's household wealth. While poor women profit in terms of increases in literacy (6.7 percentage-point increase for each year of policy-induced schooling), remunerated employment opportunities (5.7 percentage-point increase), as well as a reduction in desired and actual fertility outcomes (6.9 percentage-point reduction in teenage childbirth), none of these effects of additional education are observed for women from the wealthier households of our sample. The evidence of such a marked heterogeneity contributes to the growing literature examining the nexus between education and fertility in developing countries and helps to evaluate under which conditions the literature's findings may generalize. 

Together with David Stadelmann

We investigate georeferenced household-level data consisting of up to 128,609 individuals living in 11,261 localities across 17 coastal sub-Saharan African countries over 20 years. We analyze the relevance of coastal proximity, measured by the geographic distance to harbors, as a predictor of individual economic living standards. Our setting allows us to account for country-time fixed effects as well as individual-specific controls. Results reveal that individuals living further away from the coast are significantly poorer, measured along an array of welfare indicators. Our findings are robust to the inclusion of other geographic covariates of development such as climate (e.g., temperature, precipitation) or terrain conditions (e.g., ruggedness, land suitability). We also explore mechanisms through which coastal proximity may matter for individual welfare and decompose the estimated effect of coastal proximity via formal mediation analysis. Our results highlight the role of human capital, urbanization, and infrastructural endowments in explaining within-country differences in individual economic welfare.

I investigate the impact of the East African Community (EAC) on household welfare using three distinct sets of longitudinal, geo-referenced household-level surveys from the three founding members Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. I thereby treat the re-establishment of the EAC in 2001 – and the expansion to a customs union and common market in 2005 and 2010, respectively – as a regional policy intervention having differential effects on individual households governed by their geo-spatial location within the countries, a prediction I derive formally from a canonical New Economic Geography (NEG) model, i.e. from a quantitative spatial equilibrium with heterogenous intra-national space. To test this hypothesis, I employ a difference-in-differences specification with treatment intensity given by households’ road distance to internal EAC border crossings, effectively comparing outcomes between ‘interior’ and ‘border’ households (first difference) before and after the intervention (second difference). Results reveal that households located closer to the internal EAC border did not experience positive welfare effects following the re-establishment. Rather, the results hint at the concentration of economic activity, as measured by increased consumption as well as extensive and intensive labor market opportunities in agglomerations. 

Together with Josephine Baako-Amponsah & David Stadelmann

In this paper, we leverage a large-scale, geo-referenced household-level survey covering 28 African countries over 16 years to provide new evidence on the link between rising temperatures and living standards in a particularly vulnerable region. We thereby evaluate both the short-term response to temperature (shocks) and the long-term equilibrium effects of climate change by matching daily- and long-term average temperature data to 168,585 individuals across 14,186 unique survey locales. Our results consistently confirm the expected negative relationship between temperature and individual living standards in Sub-Saharan Africa. Elevated temperatures are linked to greater insufficiencies in meeting basic needs such as access to food, water, healthcare, and income, whether experienced as shocks or long-term averages. However, the quantitative relevance of temperature increases on deprivation is comparatively modest. Furthermore, our findings underscore the role of local infrastructural investments in moderating the negative impacts of both short-term weather variability as well as long-term climate change. 

Together with Raymond B. Frempong  & David Stadelmann

In this paper, we investigate how ethnic identity shapes individual attitudes towards integration and immigration (ATII) in Sub-Saharan Africa. Drawing on survey data from 42,640 respondents across 32 countries, we find that individuals who identify more strongly with their ethnic group – as opposed to their national identity – are significantly less likely to exhibit positive attitudes. We also explore the critical influence of ethnic legacies and find that separatism, experiences of past discrimination, and loss of political autonomy further intensify ethnically motivated opposition to integration. Finally, our analysis highlights the importance of regional context; in areas with higher immigrant shares and greater ethno-linguistic diversity, the negative relationship is even more pronounced.

Together with Annica Wattler & David Stadelmann

Over the past decade, a substantial body of research has emerged leveraging large-scale educational policy reforms in Africa, so-called Free Primary Education (FPE) policies, to examine the causal effect of education on women’s sexual and reproductive health (SRH). Yet, studies diverge markedly in key methodological choices and are disproportionately concentrated on a few countries, resulting in effect size estimates that vary sufficiently to preclude ruling out zero mean impacts (Psaki et al. 2019). This study offers the first harmonized, region-wide evaluation of FPE-induced education on women’s SRH. Pooling all available Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from all countries that have ever implemented FPE, we employ a standardized, algorithm-driven regression discontinuity design (RDD) to produce robust empirical estimates with minimized researcher discretion. We also aim to explore macro- and micro-level determinants of both educational attainment (first-stage estimates) as well as downstream outcomes on reproductive health (second-stage effects). Given the large scale and cost of FPE policies, generating rigorous and generalizable evidence on the conditions under which they succeed offers crucial insights for both the development economics literature and the design of future education policy.