| This dissertation consists of three chapters relevant to the study of development of poor nations. The first chapter describes the dismal performance of the African continent during the XXth century. The weak evolution of the GDP per capita has been translated into worsening of inequality and poverty. This, which is in clear contrast with the experience of the rest of the world, has made Africa the home of almost half of all poor people in the world. In this chapter, we try to understand what went wrong over the last forty years as an attempt to improve the future.; The second chapter begins with the finding that in Sub-Saharan Africa, variation in weather and nutrition causes children born in certain months to be up to three percentage points more likely to die. However, parents do not always time births for low-mortality months. Agricultural cycles may help explain why: in some areas, low-mortality months coincide with high demand for women's labor. Thus, parents are faced with a stark trade-off between their newborn's health and family income. The results suggest that the best policies to reduce infant mortality are geographic specific. In places where the trade-off is extreme, the greatest help may be in programs towards smoothing family consumption, such as access to credit and economic diversification. While in other regions family planning campaigns can have benefits beyond helping control family size, birth spacing, and exposure to sexually transmitted diseases: they can also help families optimally time births and thus assist them in raising healthier children.; The last chapter focuses on the long-standing question of whether individuals' decisions are influenced by the cultural or social choices of their peers. Estimating such social effects can be difficult because people self-select into peer groups. I present an approach to instrument for the group behavior that can be applicable in many settings and gets around the usual identification problems we encounter. Establishing the existence and quantifying the importance of social effects can be crucial to apply the right policies, especially in the context of poor countries where resources are scarce. |
