Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) January 2018 Meeting

We are pleased to send out a call for papers for a special international meeting of the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) which will be held January 26-28, 2018 at New York University-Abu Dhabi.

Call for papers/research designs

We invite through this call papers and research designs to be presented during the international meeting in Abu Dhabi. Paper/research design submissions must reflect WGAPE’s broad research agenda on core issues within the political economy of African development, including ethnic politics, civil conflict and violence, decentralization and democratization, corruption, local governance, public economics, and related topics. Please feel free to submit early-stage works! Experimental research with field data will be given priority. Graduate students, junior faculty, and developing country researchers are particularly encouraged to apply. See archive of papers discussed at past WGAPE meetings here.

Call for applications: Social Science Research Methods Training for African scholars

This year, we will also invite applications through a separate call for African scholars to attend both the WGAPE meeting and a special training session led by Evidence in Government in Politics (EGAP), cosponsored by the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS). The four-day training will take place on January 22-25 and will focus on cutting-edge research methods for social sciences in developing countries.

This opportunity is limited to graduate students, post-docs, and junior faculty working in political economy who either a) currently hold a faculty or research position at an African institution, b) received or are actively pursuing a graduate degree at an African institution, or c) received an undergraduate degree from an African institution and are currently in graduate school elsewhere.

Please see the attached files for more detailed information on how to apply to each of these calls. Successful applicants for both paper/research design submissions and the training session will be notified by November 6th, 2017 and will be invited to attend the full symposium. WGAPE will cover the cost of economy travel, accommodation and related expenses.

To find out more about the WGAPE network, please check out our website here. Please reach out to Alex Dobyan at wgapeworkshop@gmail.com with any questions.

Photo Credit: Emilia Tjernström

Agenda

Papers to be presented at NYU-Abu Dhabi:

• Jeremy Bowles, Harvard, “Turning Up, Tuning In, Turning Out: Experimental Evidence from Liberia”
• Jeffrey Conroy-Krutz, Michigan State, “Up for Debate? Using Radio to Reduce Polarization and Increase Democratic Engagement in Niger”
• Emilio Depetris-Chauvin, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, “One Team, One Nation: Football, Ethnic Identity, and Conflict in Africa”
• Andy Harris, NYU-Abu Dhabi, “Judicial Decisions as Public Goods”
• Alice Iannantuoni, Illinois-Champaign, “The Young and the Restless: A Quasi-Experimental Evaluation of Whether a Radio Soap Opera Can Catalyze Social Change”
• Gisella Kagy, Vassar, “If She Builds It, They Won’t Come: Experimental Evidence of Demand-Side Constraints in the Gender Profit Gap”
• Constantine Manda, Yale, “Minority Presidents and Ethnic Politics”
• George Marbuah, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, “How do Natural Resources Affect Human Capital Accumulation in Developing Countries? Evidence from Ghana”
• John Marshall, Columbia, “Learning accountability: Can formal education help hold politicians to account?”
• Michael Mbate, LSE, “Politically Induced Budgetary Distortions: Evidence from Kenya”
• Kate Orkin, Oxford, “Everybody loves a winner: A field experiment providing information on polls in South Africa”
• Yared Seid, International Growth Centre, “Mother-tongue Instruction and Later Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in Ethiopia”
• Vanessa van den Boogaard, University of Toronto, “Informal taxation in post-conflict Sierra Leone”