Cameroon was partitioned between France and the United Kingdom after WWI and then reunited after independence. I use this natural experiment to investigate colonial legacies in education, using a border discontinuity analysis of historical census microdata from 1976. I find that men born in the decades following partition had, all else equal, one more year of schooling if they were born in the British part. This positive British effect disappeared after 1950, as the French increased education expenditure, and because of favoritism in school supply towards the Francophone side after reunification. Using 2005 census microdata, I find that the British advantage resurfaced more recently: Cameroonians born after 1970 are more likely to finish high school, attend a university, and have a high-skilled occupation if they were born in the former British part. I explain this result by the legacy of high grade repetition rates in the French-speaking education system and their detrimental effect on dropout.

What was the capacity of European colonial states? How fiscally extractive were they? What was their capacity to provide public goods and services? And did this change in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism? To answer these questions, we use archival sources to build a new dataset on colonial states of the second French colonial empire (1830–1962). French colonial states extracted a substantial amount of revenue, but they were under-administered because public expenditure entailed high wage costs. These costs remained a strong constraint in the “developmentalist” era of colonialism, despite a dramatic increase in fiscal capacity and large overseas subsidies.

Institutions historiques et développement économique en Afrique. Une revue sélective et critique de travaux récents Résumé. Cet article effectue une revue sélective de travaux récents d'économistes étudiant l'impact des institutions historiques sur le développement économique en Afrique. Nous discutons d'abord quelques questions conceptuelles impliquées par la mesure des institutions, puis présentons les données rassemblées par l'anthropologue G. P. Murdock et leurs principales critiques. Plusieurs travaux mobilisent à nouveau ces données pour montrer que certaines institutions « ethniques » précoloniales constituent des déterminants fondamentaux des différences de développement contemporaines. Nous commentons ces travaux puis les comparons avec d'autres qui relativisent plutôt les différences institutionnelles héritées de la période coloniale. Nous défendons en conclusion que des comparaisons d'études de cas sont plus fructueuses que des études transversales reposant sur des variations mal contrôlées.

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We estimate the causal effect of losing a father in the U.S. Civil War on children's long-run socioeconomic outcomes. Linking military records from the 2.2 million Union Army soldiers with the 1860 U.S. population Census, we track soldiers' sons into the 1880 and 1900 Census. Sons of soldiers who died had a lower occupational income score and were less likely to have a high-or semi-skilled job as opposed to being low-skilled or farmers. These effects persisted at least until the 1900 census. Our results are robust to instrumenting paternal death with the mortality rate of the father's regiment, which we argue was driven by military strategy that did not take into account the social origins of soldiers. Pre-war family wealth is a strong mitigating factor: there is no effect of losing a father in the top quartile of the wealth distribution.