James Fenske
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 285717 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | James Fenske |
| NOMBRES | James |
| APELLIDO | Fenske |
| FIRMA | FENSKE J |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Warwick |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6003-629X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 29 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 267 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2010 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Colonial Cities and Urbanization
The chapter describes colonial India’s unique urbanization story. In 1750 India had big urban centres such as Hyderabad and Delhi and urbanization was close to the global average. While urbanization in India increased over the next two centuries, the increase was small compared to the rest of the world and Indian urbanization had fallen significantly below the global average by 1950. Yet the modest temporal change masks the important shift in urb…
The Impacts of Local Housing Markets on U.S. Presidential Elections
Housing is an important asset for many households in the United States. Nevertheless, our understanding of the relationships between housing markets and election outcomes remains somewhat limited. Examining the influence of local housing markets on U.S. presidential elections in the past three decades, this paper presents evidence that a faster rise in county‐level house prices increases the share of the county's vote that goes to the incumbent p…
Missing women in colonial India
We construct novel data on female population shares by age, district, and religion in South Asia from 1881 to 1931. Sex ratios skew male in Northern India and are more balanced in Southern and Eastern India, including Burma. Male-biased sex ratios emerge most visibly after age 10, and this is not specific to any one region, religion, or time period. Sikhs have the most male-biased sex ratios, followed by Hindus, Muslims, and Jains. The female sha…
Dust and Death
Using two decades of data from 12 low-income countries in West Africa, we show that dust carried by harmattan trade winds increases infant and child mortality. Health investments respond to dust exposure, consistent with compensating behaviours. Despite these efforts, surviving children still exhibit negative health impacts. Our data allow us to investigate differential impacts over time and across countries. We find declining impacts over time, …
Fetal Origins of Mental Health
Mental health disorders represent a substantial portion of the global disease burden, and the treatment gap is higher in developing countries. Accounting for location and year-of-birth fixed effects and using data on 19 African countries, we find temperature shocks in utero increase depressive symptoms in adulthood. Effects are present for several depressive symptoms and are greatest in younger cohorts
Tradition and mortality
Traditions can limit investment in early life health, even if they have been abandoned. We introduce data on historic twin infanticide and merge it with recent birth records from 23 African countries. We use the full sample and a border sample of adjacent societies with and without past twin infanticide. Both samples provide no evidence that past twin infanticide predicts greater differential twin mortality today. This null result is likely a con…
Railways, Development, and Literacy in India
We study the effect of railroads, the single largest public investment in colonial India, on human capital. Using district-level data on literacy and two different identification strategies, we find railroads had positive effects on literacy, in particular on male and English literacy. We show that railroads increased literacy by raising secondary and elite primary schooling, rather than vernacular primary schooling. Our mediation analysis sugges…
Conflict and the Formation of Political Beliefs in Africa
We test whether living through conflict in childhood changes political beliefs and engagement. We combine data on the location and intensity of conflicts since 1945 with nationally representative data on political attitudes and behaviors from 17 sub-Saharan African countries. Exposure from ages 0 to 14 has a very small standardized impact on later attitudes and behaviors. This finding is robust to migration and holds across a variety of definitio…
Railways and cities in India
Using a new dataset on city populations in colonial India, we show that the railroad network increased city size in the period 1881 to 1931. Our baseline estimation approach includes fixed effects for city and year, and we construct instrumental variables for railroad proximity based on distance from a least cost path spanning cities that existed prior to the start of railroad construction. Cities that increased market access due to the railroad …
Demographic Shocks and Women's Labor Market Participation
How did the 1918 influenza pandemic affect female labor force participation in India over the short run and the medium run? We use an event-study approach at the district level and four waves of decadal census data in order to answer this question. We find that districts most adversely affected by influenza mortality saw a temporary increase in female labor force participation in 1921, an increase that was concentrated in the service sector. We f…
Pre-Colonial Warfare and Long-Run Development in India
Does pre-colonial history—and in particular the role of interstate warfare—help explain long-run development patterns across India? To address this question, we construct a new geocoded database of historical conflicts on the Indian subcontinent. We document a robust positive relationship between pre-colonial conflict exposure and local economic development today. Drawing on archival and secondary data, we show that districts that were more expos…
Linguistic Distance and Market Integration in India
The role of cultural distance in market integration, particularly in the developing world, has received relatively little attention. Using prices from more than 200 South Asian markets spanning 1861 to 1921, we show that linguistic distance correlates negatively with market integration. A one-standard-deviation increase in linguistic distance predicts a reduction in the price correlation between two markets of 0.121 standard deviations for wheat,…
Resources, conflict, and economic development in Africa
Is Africa Different? Historical Conflict and State Development
We show new evidence that the consequences of historical warfare for state development differ for Sub-Saharan Africa. We identify the locations of more than 1,600 conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe from 1400 to 1799. We find that historical warfare predicts common-interest states defined by high fiscal capacity and low civil conflict across much of the Old World. For Sub-Saharan Africa, historical warfare predicts special-interest states defin…
Early Life Circumstance and Adult Mental Health
We show that psychological well-being in adulthood varies substantially with circumstance in early life. Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we find that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early life decreases the likelihood of severe mental distress in adulthood by 3 percentage points (or half the mean prevalence) for cohorts born in cocoa-producing…
Economic shocks, conflict and the slave trade
Intra-household labor allocation in colonial Nigeria
African polygamy
Climate and the slave trade
Imachi Nkwu
The conventional view is that an increase in the value of a natural resource can lead to private property over it. Many Igbo groups in Nigeria, however, curtailed private rights over palm trees in response to the palm produce trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I use the Ostrom (2007, 2009) framework for analyzing social-ecological systems to guide the construction of a model of this transition. An increase in the resource pric…
The battle for rubber in Benin
Nigerian rubber exports expanded rapidly during the Second World War 'battle for rubber'. This was achieved by overcoming obstacles to greater exploitation of both wild and planted rubber. This article outlines Nigeria's wartime experience, focusing on the Benin region that dominated smallholder production after the war. British policies initially restricted rubber planting. After Japan occupied South-East Asia, Britain encouraged maximum product…
Does Land Abundance Explain African Institutions
Journal Article Does Land Abundance Explain African Institutions? Get access James Fenske James Fenske Department of Economics University of Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 123, Issue 573, 1 December 2013, Pages 1363–1390, https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12034 Published: 03 June 2013 Article history Received: 08 March 2012 Accepted: 14 December 2012 Published: 03 June 2013
Trees, tenure and conflict
Tree crops have changed land tenure in Africa.Farmers have acquired permanent, alienable rights, but have also faced disputes with competing claimants and the state.Para rubber had many similar effects in the Benin region of colonial Nigeria.Farmers initially obtained land by traditional methods.Mature farms could be sold, let out, and used to raise credit.Disputes over rubber involved smallholders, communities of rival users, and migrants
Partition, Migration, and Jute Cultivation in India
We show that refugees can play positive roles in receiving economies by looking at the partition of India. We use an instrumental variables strategy to show that migrants played a major part in India's take-up of jute cultivation. Our estimates suggest that migrants fully explain post-partition jute cultivation. Consistent with migrants bringing jute-specific skills with them, we find that migrants did not depress jute yields, did not increase th…
Rubber will not keep in this country”
Land tenure and investment incentives
Early Life Circumstance and Adult Mental Health
We show that psychological well-being in adulthood varies substantially with circumstance in early life. Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we find that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early life decreases the likelihood of severe mental distress in adulthood by 3 percentage points (or half the mean prevalence) for cohorts born in cocoa-producing…
Does Land Abundance Explain African Institutions
Journal Article Does Land Abundance Explain African Institutions? Get access James Fenske James Fenske Department of Economics University of Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 123, Issue 573, 1 December 2013, Pages 1363–1390, https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12034 Published: 03 June 2013 Article history Received: 08 March 2012 Accepted: 14 December 2012 Published: 03 June 2013
Climate and the slave trade
Is Africa Different? Historical Conflict and State Development
We show new evidence that the consequences of historical warfare for state development differ for Sub-Saharan Africa. We identify the locations of more than 1,600 conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe from 1400 to 1799. We find that historical warfare predicts common-interest states defined by high fiscal capacity and low civil conflict across much of the Old World. For Sub-Saharan Africa, historical warfare predicts special-interest states defin…
Pre-Colonial Warfare and Long-Run Development in India
Does pre-colonial history—and in particular the role of interstate warfare—help explain long-run development patterns across India? To address this question, we construct a new geocoded database of historical conflicts on the Indian subcontinent. We document a robust positive relationship between pre-colonial conflict exposure and local economic development today. Drawing on archival and secondary data, we show that districts that were more expos…
Land abundance and economic institutions
The 'land abundance' view of African history uses sparse population to explain economic institutions. This article uses colonial court records to show that the Egba of Nigeria fit this theory's predictions. Before 1914, the Egba had imprecisely defined land rights, relied on dependent and forced labour, and used labour to secure loans. These institutions responded to the changing availability of land, labour, and capital. An initial period of lan…
Railways and cities in India
Using a new dataset on city populations in colonial India, we show that the railroad network increased city size in the period 1881 to 1931. Our baseline estimation approach includes fixed effects for city and year, and we construct instrumental variables for railroad proximity based on distance from a least cost path spanning cities that existed prior to the start of railroad construction. Cities that increased market access due to the railroad …
Rubber will not keep in this country”
Demographic Shocks and Women's Labor Market Participation
How did the 1918 influenza pandemic affect female labor force participation in India over the short run and the medium run? We use an event-study approach at the district level and four waves of decadal census data in order to answer this question. We find that districts most adversely affected by influenza mortality saw a temporary increase in female labor force participation in 1921, an increase that was concentrated in the service sector. We f…
Trees, tenure and conflict
Tree crops have changed land tenure in Africa.Farmers have acquired permanent, alienable rights, but have also faced disputes with competing claimants and the state.Para rubber had many similar effects in the Benin region of colonial Nigeria.Farmers initially obtained land by traditional methods.Mature farms could be sold, let out, and used to raise credit.Disputes over rubber involved smallholders, communities of rival users, and migrants
The Causal History of Africa
In this article I reply to critiques by Jerven and Hopkins of my review “The causal history of Africa: response to Hopkins” (2010). I agree, with caveats, that non-econometric approaches are valuable, that data quality matters, and that the compression of history can be a bad thing. Historians should not dismiss technique for being technique, should not discard imperfect data, and should be careful making inferences from small samples. The strate…
Linguistic Distance and Market Integration in India
The role of cultural distance in market integration, particularly in the developing world, has received relatively little attention. Using prices from more than 200 South Asian markets spanning 1861 to 1921, we show that linguistic distance correlates negatively with market integration. A one-standard-deviation increase in linguistic distance predicts a reduction in the price correlation between two markets of 0.121 standard deviations for wheat,…
The Causal History of Africa
In a recent paper for the Journal of African History, A.G. Hopkins writes that economists have spent the last decade writing a “new” economic history of Africa that has escaped the notice of historians. He labels the “ethnolinguistic fractionalization” and “reversal of fortune” theses as this literature's key insights. In this paper, I shall argue that the most valuable contributions to the new economic history of Africa are not distinguished by …
Railways, Development, and Literacy in India
We study the effect of railroads, the single largest public investment in colonial India, on human capital. Using district-level data on literacy and two different identification strategies, we find railroads had positive effects on literacy, in particular on male and English literacy. We show that railroads increased literacy by raising secondary and elite primary schooling, rather than vernacular primary schooling. Our mediation analysis sugges…
Resources, conflict, and economic development in Africa
Intra-household labor allocation in colonial Nigeria
Conflict and the Formation of Political Beliefs in Africa
We test whether living through conflict in childhood changes political beliefs and engagement. We combine data on the location and intensity of conflicts since 1945 with nationally representative data on political attitudes and behaviors from 17 sub-Saharan African countries. Exposure from ages 0 to 14 has a very small standardized impact on later attitudes and behaviors. This finding is robust to migration and holds across a variety of definitio…
Imachi Nkwu
The conventional view is that an increase in the value of a natural resource can lead to private property over it. Many Igbo groups in Nigeria, however, curtailed private rights over palm trees in response to the palm produce trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I use the Ostrom (2007, 2009) framework for analyzing social-ecological systems to guide the construction of a model of this transition. An increase in the resource pric…
Dust and Death
Using two decades of data from 12 low-income countries in West Africa, we show that dust carried by harmattan trade winds increases infant and child mortality. Health investments respond to dust exposure, consistent with compensating behaviours. Despite these efforts, surviving children still exhibit negative health impacts. Our data allow us to investigate differential impacts over time and across countries. We find declining impacts over time, …
Fetal Origins of Mental Health
Mental health disorders represent a substantial portion of the global disease burden, and the treatment gap is higher in developing countries. Accounting for location and year-of-birth fixed effects and using data on 19 African countries, we find temperature shocks in utero increase depressive symptoms in adulthood. Effects are present for several depressive symptoms and are greatest in younger cohorts
Tradition and mortality
Traditions can limit investment in early life health, even if they have been abandoned. We introduce data on historic twin infanticide and merge it with recent birth records from 23 African countries. We use the full sample and a border sample of adjacent societies with and without past twin infanticide. Both samples provide no evidence that past twin infanticide predicts greater differential twin mortality today. This null result is likely a con…
The Causal History of Africa
In a recent paper for the Journal of African History, A.G. Hopkins writes that economists have spent the last decade writing a “new” economic history of Africa that has escaped the notice of historians. He labels the “ethnolinguistic fractionalization” and “reversal of fortune” theses as this literature's key insights. In this paper, I shall argue that the most valuable contributions to the new economic history of Africa are not distinguished by …
Land tenure and investment incentives
The Causal History of Africa
In this article I reply to critiques by Jerven and Hopkins of my review “The causal history of Africa: response to Hopkins” (2010). I agree, with caveats, that non-econometric approaches are valuable, that data quality matters, and that the compression of history can be a bad thing. Historians should not dismiss technique for being technique, should not discard imperfect data, and should be careful making inferences from small samples. The strate…
Partition, Migration, and Jute Cultivation in India
We show that refugees can play positive roles in receiving economies by looking at the partition of India. We use an instrumental variables strategy to show that migrants played a major part in India's take-up of jute cultivation. Our estimates suggest that migrants fully explain post-partition jute cultivation. Consistent with migrants bringing jute-specific skills with them, we find that migrants did not depress jute yields, did not increase th…
Rubber will not keep in this country”
Land abundance and economic institutions
The 'land abundance' view of African history uses sparse population to explain economic institutions. This article uses colonial court records to show that the Egba of Nigeria fit this theory's predictions. Before 1914, the Egba had imprecisely defined land rights, relied on dependent and forced labour, and used labour to secure loans. These institutions responded to the changing availability of land, labour, and capital. An initial period of lan…
Does Land Abundance Explain African Institutions
Journal Article Does Land Abundance Explain African Institutions? Get access James Fenske James Fenske Department of Economics University of Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, Volume 123, Issue 573, 1 December 2013, Pages 1363–1390, https://doi.org/10.1111/ecoj.12034 Published: 03 June 2013 Article history Received: 08 March 2012 Accepted: 14 December 2012 Published: 03 June 2013
Trees, tenure and conflict
Tree crops have changed land tenure in Africa.Farmers have acquired permanent, alienable rights, but have also faced disputes with competing claimants and the state.Para rubber had many similar effects in the Benin region of colonial Nigeria.Farmers initially obtained land by traditional methods.Mature farms could be sold, let out, and used to raise credit.Disputes over rubber involved smallholders, communities of rival users, and migrants
Climate and the slave trade
Imachi Nkwu
The conventional view is that an increase in the value of a natural resource can lead to private property over it. Many Igbo groups in Nigeria, however, curtailed private rights over palm trees in response to the palm produce trade of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I use the Ostrom (2007, 2009) framework for analyzing social-ecological systems to guide the construction of a model of this transition. An increase in the resource pric…
The battle for rubber in Benin
Nigerian rubber exports expanded rapidly during the Second World War 'battle for rubber'. This was achieved by overcoming obstacles to greater exploitation of both wild and planted rubber. This article outlines Nigeria's wartime experience, focusing on the Benin region that dominated smallholder production after the war. British policies initially restricted rubber planting. After Japan occupied South-East Asia, Britain encouraged maximum product…
African polygamy
Intra-household labor allocation in colonial Nigeria
Economic shocks, conflict and the slave trade
Early Life Circumstance and Adult Mental Health
We show that psychological well-being in adulthood varies substantially with circumstance in early life. Combining a time series of real producer prices of cocoa with a nationally representative household survey in Ghana, we find that a one standard deviation rise in the cocoa price in early life decreases the likelihood of severe mental distress in adulthood by 3 percentage points (or half the mean prevalence) for cohorts born in cocoa-producing…
Is Africa Different? Historical Conflict and State Development
We show new evidence that the consequences of historical warfare for state development differ for Sub-Saharan Africa. We identify the locations of more than 1,600 conflicts in Africa, Asia, and Europe from 1400 to 1799. We find that historical warfare predicts common-interest states defined by high fiscal capacity and low civil conflict across much of the Old World. For Sub-Saharan Africa, historical warfare predicts special-interest states defin…
Resources, conflict, and economic development in Africa
Pre-Colonial Warfare and Long-Run Development in India
Does pre-colonial history—and in particular the role of interstate warfare—help explain long-run development patterns across India? To address this question, we construct a new geocoded database of historical conflicts on the Indian subcontinent. We document a robust positive relationship between pre-colonial conflict exposure and local economic development today. Drawing on archival and secondary data, we show that districts that were more expos…
Linguistic Distance and Market Integration in India
The role of cultural distance in market integration, particularly in the developing world, has received relatively little attention. Using prices from more than 200 South Asian markets spanning 1861 to 1921, we show that linguistic distance correlates negatively with market integration. A one-standard-deviation increase in linguistic distance predicts a reduction in the price correlation between two markets of 0.121 standard deviations for wheat,…
Railways and cities in India
Using a new dataset on city populations in colonial India, we show that the railroad network increased city size in the period 1881 to 1931. Our baseline estimation approach includes fixed effects for city and year, and we construct instrumental variables for railroad proximity based on distance from a least cost path spanning cities that existed prior to the start of railroad construction. Cities that increased market access due to the railroad …
Demographic Shocks and Women's Labor Market Participation
How did the 1918 influenza pandemic affect female labor force participation in India over the short run and the medium run? We use an event-study approach at the district level and four waves of decadal census data in order to answer this question. We find that districts most adversely affected by influenza mortality saw a temporary increase in female labor force participation in 1921, an increase that was concentrated in the service sector. We f…
Tradition and mortality
Traditions can limit investment in early life health, even if they have been abandoned. We introduce data on historic twin infanticide and merge it with recent birth records from 23 African countries. We use the full sample and a border sample of adjacent societies with and without past twin infanticide. Both samples provide no evidence that past twin infanticide predicts greater differential twin mortality today. This null result is likely a con…
Railways, Development, and Literacy in India
We study the effect of railroads, the single largest public investment in colonial India, on human capital. Using district-level data on literacy and two different identification strategies, we find railroads had positive effects on literacy, in particular on male and English literacy. We show that railroads increased literacy by raising secondary and elite primary schooling, rather than vernacular primary schooling. Our mediation analysis sugges…
Conflict and the Formation of Political Beliefs in Africa
We test whether living through conflict in childhood changes political beliefs and engagement. We combine data on the location and intensity of conflicts since 1945 with nationally representative data on political attitudes and behaviors from 17 sub-Saharan African countries. Exposure from ages 0 to 14 has a very small standardized impact on later attitudes and behaviors. This finding is robust to migration and holds across a variety of definitio…
Dust and Death
Using two decades of data from 12 low-income countries in West Africa, we show that dust carried by harmattan trade winds increases infant and child mortality. Health investments respond to dust exposure, consistent with compensating behaviours. Despite these efforts, surviving children still exhibit negative health impacts. Our data allow us to investigate differential impacts over time and across countries. We find declining impacts over time, …
Economics (25 obras) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (16 obras) · Geography (14 obras) · Political science (14 obras) · Sociology (10 obras) · Colonialism (8 obras) · Development economics (8 obras) · Law (8 obras) · Economic growth (6 obras) · History (6 obras)