Not only do Africa's fragile states grow more slowly than non-fragile states, but they seem to be caught in a "fragility trap". For instance, the probability that a fragile state in 2001 was still fragile in 2009 was 0.95. This paper presents an economic model where three features -- political instabi...

This paper uses a three-step Bayesian cross-entropy estimation approach in an environment of noisy and scarce data to estimate behavioral parameters for a computable general equilibrium model. The estimation also measures how labor-augmenting productivity and other structural parameters in the model m...

Using a data-driven empirical case study method, the paper evaluates the impact of one identified reform program on development outcomes. The paper uses the World Bank Country Policy and Institutional Assessment Ratings to identify large scale structural and macro-level policy interventions in the las...