Workshop on climate, geography and African economic history

This week I attended an ERSA economic history workshop and want to briefly report just how interesting it was.The theme was climate, geography and African economic history and there were a number of interesting papers.

James Fenske (in a paper with Namrata Kala) spoke about climate and the slave trade. They examine the influence of African factors on the supply of slaves, specifically environmental shocks. They have port-level data for the transatlantic slave trade as well as temperature, climate and climate shocks. Places that were cooler had higher productivity, lower mortality and more slavery (than warmer regions that typically had more tse tse flies and malaria). In warmer (drier) years these places experienced climate shocks that increased the cost of slavery and reduced the supply of slaves. They then go on to link this to modern development outcomes using light density at night to proxy for economic activity. The areas around the ports that received cold temperature shocks at the peak of the transatlantic slave trade are poorer today! In other words, their better agricultural productivity could not make up for the fact that they lost more people to slavery and had the institutions that made them lose people to slavery. Check out James' web site for the paper, slides and a link to a Vox.EU post. The paper is also a great example of thorough work. It controls for everything and checks robustness from every angle.

Ed Kerby also presented interesting work in the Kenyan railways from a paper with Remi Jedwab and Alex Moradi.The full title is History, path dependence and development: Evidence from colonial railroads, settlers and cities in Kenya. Their focus is on urban emergence, persistence and optimality using the exogenous placement of the so-called "lunatic line" as a natural experiment. The analysis shows that colonial railroads causally determined the location of European settlers, which in turn decided the location of the main cities of the country at independence. Railroads declined and settlers left after independence, yet cities persisted. The paper has some really interesting data and use of "placebo lines" to test the robustness of the results. It is well worth the read if you are interested in economic geography and economic history.

Alfonso Herranz-Loncan and Johan Fourie also presented some first-round work on the social savings of the South African railways. It is a paper to look forward to as we talk about modern day extension of infrastructure in South Africa.

And there were some other interesting papers on local labour markets, on settlement patterns and on climate change in Africa. All round a big success (the people + the Noordhoek venue + the visit to the District 6 museum). A special word of thanks is due to ERSA and Johan Fourie for making the workshop possible.

More links that I liked

Everyday I see loads of interesting things on the internet via Twitter and different blogs. Typically the articles or posts get a quick scan and then saved to Evernote. I was tagging and sorting some links today and found a few nice ones from the last week or so to share:

• From the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, some research that I am also interested in for the South African contex: Do big cities help college graduates find better jobs?
• The Guardian Africa Network has an excellent post: In search of the African middle class. It is something that is punted everywhere as a key driver of growth over the next few years, but the post shows that this has to be taken with a good grain of salt. Yes, many people are getting out of extreme poverty, but the middle class is only the middle of a very skewed income distribution. "The Africa Bank of Development defines "middle class" as those spending between $2 and $20 per day. By its own admission though, about 60% of those only spend between $2 and $4 per day".
• Via Marginal Revolution blog Andrew Oswald has some good advice for young researchers:

If everyone likes your work, you can be certain that you haven’t done anything important. Conflict and pain go with the territory –

that of changing how a profession thinks and furthering what we know about our world. The pressures on young researchers are to conform, to accept fashionable ways of analyzing problems, and above all to please senior professors and their own peers. Unfortunately this is bad for scientific progress.

The main difference between world-class researchers and sound researchers is not intellect; it is energy, single-mindedness, more energy, and the ability to withstand what will sometimes feel like never-ending disappointment, tiredness and psychological pain. Tenacity is almost everything.

•  I am still planning that ultimate MOOC post, but this one by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker comes close to drawing together a lot of the views out there: Laptop U.
• Inside Higher Ed reported on a new test of non-academic predictors of academic success - a suite of attributes that some researchers have dubbed "grit".
• And finally Edudemic had a nice post on using badges in your classroom. I still ant to try this in the second semester.

That's it for now. Enjoy.

Links to share

Even now that I am stuck at home the recommended reading comes in from all over and I want to share a couple of links to posts that I have liked.

• An interesting one at the NewGeography was on the size of manufacturing establishments in the US. It seems that work sites are getting smaller, firms are starting smaller and staying smaller. The average manufacturing establishment was home to 35 jobs in 2012.
• Linking on to that, a new paper in the Journal of African Economies asks whether Africa can industrialise - in other words "what will it take for the typical low-income economy in Africa to accelerate the shift of labor from low productivity jobs in agriculture and the informal sector to higher productivity jobs in agro-industry, manufacturing or tradable services?" The paper goes on to argue that the required structural change has not taken place and that Africa faces a different industrialisation challenge to the one that earlier entrants into manufacturing did. It recommends three interrelated initiatives: "tilting towards exports, encouraging agglomerations and building capabilities—as essential complements to investment climate reforms".