CAPERS.

CAPERS - the Comparative African Political Economy Research Seminar - is a joint NYU-Columbia Working Group for scholars of African political economy and development. It takes place once a semester, a maximum of twenty people attend, and working papers are 'presented'. That is, because people read all the papers in advance, the hour that is booked for each paper is spend completely on discussion. A total of six paper are discussed, there is lunch in between and dinner afterwards. Of those six papers 3 are from faculty and 3 are from students, each faculty paper has a student from the other university as discussant, and vice versa for a student paper.

Last Friday the 3rd CAPERS took place; this time at NYU (last time was at Columbia). As always faculty to student ratios were high (around 1 to 3), and because everybody was well-prepared and we know each other by now and thus we feel free to say what we think the discussions were great. Great to be in in a room with smart people discussing African political economy and development issues!

MONUSCO. Where is that "O" coming from?

Since years the world’s largest UN peacekeeping force (currently around 20,000 peacekeepers) is located in the Democratic Republic of Congo; MONUC after its French acronym for Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies en République Démocratique du Congo.

MONUC HQ in Sud Kivu.
Picture Simon made when we were in Bukavu last summer.

Recently the Congolese government has asked for them to leave (here). Kinshasa argues that the UN is no longer necessary; most of the fighting is over and its own forces are ready to fill the gap left by MONUC's withdrawal. I am not the biggest fan of MONUC, but this is nonsense and the UN should stay: fighting is not over (especially in the east) and Congolese forces are definitely not able to fill the gap: most haven’t been paid in many months, the Congelese army is guilty of raping and killing civilians, etc. It is more likely Kinshasa wants them to leave for two other reasons:

1. On June 30 the DRC will celebrate its 50th year of independence from Belgium; indeed, symbolically it is probably not great to the world's largest foreign force in your country;
2. Elections are coming up - expected in July 2011 for the legislative and October 2011 for the president - and MONUC not only did most of the logistics in the last one, they also monitor.

A new UN proposal is now on the table. The United Nations will withdraw 2,000 peacekeepers by June 30 (oh so symbolically), but the remaining 20,000 leave only when security improves, France's ambassador to Congo - Pierre Jacquemot - said on Monday. He also said that MONUC may be renamed to include an "S" in the acronym as the organization is refocused on security and stabilization: "The mission of 'MONUSCO' will be focused on essential tasks: the protection of the population and the stabilization of peace." Great; another acronym to learn. Btw, where is that "O" coming from? Security is Sécurité and Stabilization is Stabilisation in French; so no "O"s there. Are we talking about COngo or maybe Observation = Observation? Pierre Jacquemot: HELP.

Matthew effect.

This evening I read a literature overview by Duncan Watts of recent work on the analysis and modeling of networks and networked dynamic systems in mathematics, physics, sociology and computer science [1]. It briefly noted the Matthew effect; also know as the Yule process, the Gibrat principle, cumulative advantage, and, most recently, as the preferential attachment process. I like "Matthew effect" though, coming straight from the Bible which clearly explains the concept:

"For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away." (Matthew 25:29, New Revised Standard Version)

[1] Duncan J. Watts. 2004. The 'New' Science of Networks. Annual Review of Sociology, 30, pp. 243-70.

Nicholas Christakis.

I just saw this TED talk by Nicholas Christakis; he is Professor at Harvard and works a lot with James Fowler. The people that read this blog once in a while - hi mom - know that I am very interested in "networks". That is, how behavior is influenced by a person's position in society. Christakis and Fowler also wrote a fantastic book called "Connected". Great TED talk!

Clustering standard errors.

My dissertation's puzzle

Observation 1: The provision of public goods - roads, wells, schools, etc. - is crucial for economic development. Some villages in developing countries are able to provide them, while others are not. There is a large literature that asks: "Why?" The answer most often given is "(ethnic) diversity". The reason is that diverse villages have a harder time sanctioning non-contributors, preferences for public goods can differ across groups, and a million other reasons. Observation 2: Migration is one of the principal characteristics of the developing world; especially of conflict zones. In Eastern Congo, for example, almost 2/3rd of all people have been displaced by war at least once between 1996 and 2007. There is, however, no work that looks at the impact of migration on public goods provision. Puzzle: Intuitively one would expect that migration leads to less public goods provision: their arrival creates diversity (native versus immigrant), it could create tensions in the village, etc. So I carefully looked at our DRC data and found that villages with migrants actually have more public goods! Controlling for many confounds, this result held across the board: for wells, widening roads, clearing roads, patrols, schools and productive measures. Dissertation: In my dissertation, as a result, I will ask two main questions: 1) is this a causal story? 2) if yes, how this could this be? [1]

Clustered standard errors

When presenting my regression results I got the question: "Did you cluster your standard errors?". This is an important question. The data I used for these regressions is data from our baseline survey: in 2007 we held a survey among five households in each of over 600 randomly-selected villages in Eastern Congo, thereby obtaining information on over 3,000 households and well over 20,000 people.

Running a naive regression on this data is likely to give me wrong results because the standard errors that come with it assume that each observation is independent of all other observations in the data set. The latter, however, is not likely to be the case with my data because households of the same village are likely to be more similar on a wide variety of measures than are households that are not part of the village. As a result part of my data is correlated - this type of correlation is called intraclass correlation. The higher this intraclass correlation the less unique information each household provides and this has to be taken into account when running regressions; one has to inflate the standard errors to take this correlation into account. I therefore have to run my regression making sure that I cluster the standard errors at the village level (one can also use a multilevel model).

The answer to the above question was 'yes'; I had clustered my standard errors. Despite the fact that my standard errors - as expected - were substantially higher than would have been in the naive regression, I did not only find that (as the literature suggests) ethnic diversity is negatively correlated with public goods provision, migration (controlling for diversity and many other things) is positively correlated. Indeed a puzzle! One that I am very intrigued by and I hope to figure out why this could be the case in upcoming years.

[1] I have my proposal that includes a much more detailed discussion - also discussing endogeneity issues, hypothesizes different mechanisms how the relationship could be causal, etc. - that I will post online soonish.

Flights, and upcoming months.

My flights for upcoming months are finally booked. It took some effort as it was an optimization problem with quite a few constraints: 1) I have to be in the DRC from July - January for fieldwork, 2) I had already booked a ticket Nairobi - Johannesburg because of the World Cup (here), 3) of course I want to see my parents, and 4) it should be as cheap as possible. Ready? Here we go:

May 25: New York -> Dublin -> Amsterdam;

June 15: Amsterdam -> Istanbul -> Nairobi;

June 18: Nairobi -> Johannesburg;

July 5: Johannesburg -> Nairobi;

January 12: Nairobi -> Istanbul -> Amsterdam;

January 26: Amsterdam -> Dublin -> New York.

So in June I stay several days in Kenya? Yep. Meeting a friend and getting to know Nairobi a bit. How do I get to the Congo? Normally one flies to Kigali, but the flights were really expensive (around $500). So, now I plan to take a bus to Kigali via Kampala (around $50). A great way to see a bit of Kenya and Uganda as well.

Hell.

From xkcd: