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on Africa |
| By: | Bah, Tijan (World Bank); Batista, Catia (Nova School of Business and Economics) |
| Abstract: | Irregular migration to Europe by sea, though risky, remains one of the most popular migration options for many Sub-Saharan Africans. This study examines the drivers of irregular migration decisions using an incentivized lab-in-the-field experiment in rural Gambia, the African country with the highest per-capita rate of irregular migration to Europe. Potential migrants substantially overestimate the probability of dying en route, reporting an average belief of 51 percent compared with a best available estimate of about 20 percent. In the experiment, reducing the probability of dying en route from 50 to 20 percent raises willingness to migrate irregularly by 3.0 percentage points, while reducing the probability of obtaining legal residence from 50 to 30 percent lowers it by 2.1 points. Our results highlight the importance of potential migrants' prior beliefs in shaping responses to information and suggest that information policies that fail to account for these beliefs may backfire. |
| Keywords: | international migration, irregular migration, migration intentions, information campaigns, prior updating, migration policy, lab-in-the-field experiment, West Africa |
| JEL: | C93 D83 F22 J17 O15 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18966 |
| By: | Guarnieri, Eleonora (University of Bristol, CEPR, CESifo); Tur-Prats, Ana (University of California, Merced) |
| Abstract: | Why do some cultures go extinct while others prevail? We show that a society’s risk of cultural extinction, proxied by language loss, is shaped by its ancestral gender norms and by how these differ from those of competing cultures. Using the Ethnologue and the Male Dominance Index for a global sample of languages, we first show that languages from more gender-equal societies are likelier to go extinct. In our framework, male-dominant societies are more expansionist through two channels, military capacity sustained by surplus extraction and demographic pressure from women's specialization in domestic and reproductive labor, and therefore expand at the expense of gender-egalitarian groups. We test this in two settings. Under European colonization, we find that Indigenous groups more gender-equal than their colonizers are more vulnerable to extinction, which is best explained by asymmetries in male dominance rather than dominance more broadly. Exploiting local variation in neighbors' gender structure across Africa, we show that languages from more gender-egalitarian societies are less likely to survive in cells located close to male-dominant neighbors, with military capacity and population pressure predicting language expansion. |
| Keywords: | cultural diversity, language extinction, gender norms, inter-group contact |
| JEL: | Z10 O10 F54 J16 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18947 |
| By: | Steenkamp, Daan; Morrow, Sinead |
| Abstract: | This paper evaluates the South African Reserve Bank's historical monetary policy stance by applying different inputs to the Bank's forecasting model's Taylor rule specification. We quantify the impact of input measurement on assessments of the appropriate policy stance, as well as the impacts of a shift to a lower inflation target. Our findings emphasise the importance of communicating uncertainty around the central bank's assessment of the state of the economy, inflation expectations and price setting, and the expected path of inflation. We argue that, in the absence of a sequence of favourable economic shocks, South African interest rates will likely have to remain restrictive for longer than SARB currently assumes. |
| Keywords: | Taylor rule, reaction function |
| JEL: | E52 E47 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:esrepo:344059 |
| By: | Marco Fabbri; Nicola Lacetera; Plinio Limata |
| Abstract: | We study support for a market-based organ procurement system among Benin residents whose family lineages descend from either enslaved people or slave-owners during the Dahomey kingdom. Descendants of enslaved families support compensating kidney donors less than descendants of slave-owners, and the gap does not extend to contested markets that do not involve the body. Differences in concerns for dignity or fairness, implicit bias, moral values, or trust do not explain these findings. The evidence points instead to an intergenerationally transmitted disposition. First, recounting slavery, descendants of enslaved families for on the body being handled and valued, and place their own ancestors inside the events, whereas slave-owner descendants narrate at a remove. Second, they report less contact with organ transplantation and transfusion, and show no reaction to personal exposure to an unmet transplant need, whereas slave-owner descendants respond sharply. |
| Keywords: | moral limits to markets, slavery, ancient origins, culture |
| JEL: | D47 I11 Z13 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12990 |