Institutions, shocks, and behavior. Three essays in development economics

This thesis examines how institutions, historical shocks and economic disparities shape the economic and political behavior of individuals and communities in sub-Saharan Africa. It consists of three stand-alone chapters that exploit within-country variation and newly assembled data. The first chapter asks whether communal land tenure, a local institution for collective action, buffers rural households against drought-induced food insecurity in Nigeria. Combining four waves of the Nigerian General Household Survey Panel (2010–2019) with growing-season SPEI data, I find that drier growing seasons reduce household food security, and that more than half of this effect is offset in villages with communal arable land. These villages retain their organizational capacity under drought and have undertaken more collective investments, which, however, do not detectably protect harvests; instead, the buffering concentrates among the least food-secure households and coincides with more meal sharing in drier seasons, a pattern consistent with mutual insurance. The second chapter studies the long-run legacies of coercive cotton cultivation in colonial Mozambique on risk aversion and economic behavior. Using a spatial regression discontinuity design along the border of a former cotton concession and original survey and experimental data on 2,000 individuals, we find no significant average effect on risk aversion, but this null average masks substantial heterogeneity by exposure intensity. In areas of higher cotton suitability, where the regime was enforced for longer, individuals inside the former concession are 12 percentage points more likely to be risk averse, and more likely to participate in community savings groups and to sell their crops. These effects are larger among women, who bore the brunt of forced cotton cultivation. Since most respondents were born after the regime was abolished in 1961, these results point to long-run legacies of extractive colonial institutions on economic behavior, and on risk preferences in particular. The third chapter revisits the question of how economic inequality shapes political participation in a fragile, low-income democracy. Linking census-based measures of local asset inequality to the 1999 and 2009 presidential elections in Mozambique, we find that, contrary to theoretical expectations, rising inequality is associated with higher voter turnout in wealthier rural localities, but not with political competition. This pattern is consistent both with median voter effects and with the capture of votes by local elites.