Welcome to my website!
My name is Idris, a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics, University of South Carolina. I will be in the 2024/5 academic job market. My research fields are development economics, economic history, and political economy, with a particular focus on historical persistence, the deep roots of comparative development, and the connection between regime type and development. In my JMP I offer the first systematic investigation of the effects of Africa’s wave of democratization on economic performance and long-run development.
My research has been published in leading field journals including The Journal of Development Studies and the Oxford Development Studies. My work has also featured in major media outlets, including The Conversation. Please check the research page for my published articles, working papers and works in progress.
iddrisu.kambala[at]grad.moore.sc.edu
Abstract of Job Market Paper
I investigate the effects of Africa’s 1990s wave of democratization on economic performance and long-run development. In the first part of the study, I document, using a dynamic panel fixed effects estimation, a robust positive impact of democratization on income per capita. When an average African country moves from a nondemocratic to a democratic regime its income per person increases by about 1.2 %. Alternatively, if it improves by 10 % on the liberal democracy index, its GDP per capita rises by 1.3 %. In the second part, I investigate the association between democratization and long-run development. To isolate the causal impact of democratization on long-run development, I exploit African borders that split same people (ethnicity) into present-day consolidated democracies and nondemocracies. In this exercise, I begin by showing grid cell-level panel fixed effects estimates of the impact of democratization on nighttime lights, a proxy of subnational development. I then use a within-ethnicity regression discontinuity specification to compute the development discontinuities across democratic-nondemocratic partitions. I find that democratic and nondemocratic partitions were at similar levels of development during the early years of democratization. However, democratic partitions became increasingly more developed over time, leading to a persistent development divergence. Today an average democratic partition is about 7 percentage points more likely to have light at night relative to its nondemocratic counterpart. I also compile an individual-level data capturing members of split ethnicities and use it to show the differential positive impact of democratization on human development and several contemporary measures of socioeconomic outcomes.