Welcome to my website!
My name is Idris, and I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of South Carolina. I am currently on the 2024/2025 academic job market. My primary 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 relationship between political regime type and development.
In my job market paper, I provide the first systematic investigation of the long-run effects of Africa’s wave of democratization on economic performance and development. This work contributes to ongoing debates about the role of political institutions in shaping economic trajectories, offering fresh insights with policy implications for development strategy.
My research has been published in leading field journals, including The Journal of Development Studies and Oxford Development Studies. My work has also been featured in major media outlets, such as The Conversation, where I communicate research findings to a broader audience.
Please feel free to explore my Research page to access my published articles, working papers, and works in progress. I welcome feedback and collaborations.
Email: iddrisu.kambala[at]grad.moore.sc.edu
Abstract of Job Market Paper
I investigate the long-run effects of Africa’s 1990s wave of democratization on economic performance and long-run development. In the first part, I document a robust positive impact of democratization on income per capita using a dynamic panel fixed effects model. I find that transitioning from a nondemocratic to a democratic regime increases income per capita by about 1.2 %, while a 10 % improvement on the liberal democracy index raises GDP per capita by 1.3 %. In the second part, I isolate the causal impact of democratization on long-run development by exploiting African borders that partition historically and culturally homogeneous ethnic groups into present-day consolidated democracies and nondemocracies. In this exercise, I first present grid cell-level panel fixed effects estimates showing a robust positive impact of democratization on subnational development, measured by nighttime light density. I then employ a within-ethnicity geographic regression discontinuity specification to compute the development disparities across democratic and nondemocratic partitions over time. I find that democratic and nondemocratic partitions were initially at similar levels of development, but democratic partitions experienced sustained development gains, leading to persistent divergence. By 2013, grid cells in democratic partitions were about 7 percentage points more likely to have nighttime lights relative to their nondemocratic counterparts. Using individual-level data from partitioned ethnic groups, I further show that democratization improves human development and several contemporary socioeconomic outcomes.