Publications
Interethnic and interfaith marriages in Sub-Saharan Africa, World Development (2020), Vol. 125.
[Working Paper] [Online Appendix] [List of DHS ethnic classifications used]
[Blog posts: AEHN ; Africa at LSE ] [Press: The Economist]
This paper documents interethnic and interfaith marriage patterns to better understand which identity-related cleavages matter in sub-Saharan Africa. Using Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) spanning 15 countries, I build a representative sample of women born between 1955 and 1989. Extrapolating to the population of these countries, I find that 20.4% of marriages are interethnic and 9.7% are interfaith, indicating that ethnic and religious differences are not always barriers. Accounting for diversity levels, both shares are actually similar. Regarding the pooled sample of these 15 countries, the share of interethnic marriages increased, and there is no country where interethnic marriages became less frequent. The share of interfaith marriages decreased in the pooled sample. Only in Cameroon did interfaith marriages become more frequent. The share of Muslim-Christian marriages remained stable in the pooled sample. The increase in the share of interethnic marriages can only partly be explained by increases in urbanization and education levels, suggesting that changes in preferences and in social norms may also be at play. The decrease in the share of interfaith marriages is due to decreasing levels of religious diversity: traditional religions were replaced by Islam and Christianity. These results show that some ethnic boundaries became more porous whereas religious boundaries did not. However, religious boundaries shifted as a result of changes in the religious landscape.
Parental divorce and children’s educational outcomes in Senegal (with Rozenn Hotte), World Development (2021), Vol. 145. [Working Paper]
This paper provides new evidence on the consequences of parental divorce for children in Africa. Using survey data that collected the detailed life histories of Senegalese women and of their children, we investigate how children’s educational outcomes are affected by their parents’ divorce. We use a sibling fixed-effects strategy that allows us to control for all the factors that are common to all children in a family, such as parental preferences regarding education or the level of education of the parents, alleviating concerns of omitted variable bias. We compare children who were old enough to have been enrolled in primary school at the time of the divorce to their younger siblings, for whom enrollment decisions had not yet been made at the time of the divorce. We find that younger siblings were more likely than their older siblings to have attended primary school. This higher level of investment does not persist in the long run: there are no differences between siblings when considering primary school completion. We find that custody and fostering decisions do not seem to mediate the positive effects on school attendance. Our findings are consistent with either an improvement of the financial situation (due to remarriage) or an increase in the decision-making power of mothers after the divorce.
Regional blocs and bloc voting in national elections (with Catherine Boone). In C. Boone, Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming.
Work in progress
Sectoral interests and regional bloc voting in African countries (with Catherine Boone and Eun Kyung Kim). Submitted.
Ethnic Homogenization and Public Goods: Evidence from Kenya’s land reform program (with Catherine Boone and Alexander Moradi)
Migration and interethnic marriages in Kenya