National Institutions and Subnational Development in Africa

We thank seminar participants at Dartmouth, Tufts, Oxford, Vienna, Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, UC-Berkeley, UC-Davis, NYU, AUEB, the CEPR Development Economics Workshop,the CEPR-UPF Workshop on the Political Economy of Development and Conflict, the World Bank, the IMF, the NBER Political Economy Meetings, the NBER Summer Institute Meetings in Economic Growth and Income Distribution and the Macroeconomy for valuable comments. We also benefited from discussions with Yannis Ioannides, Rafael La Porta, Antonio Ciccone, Rob Johnson, Raphael Frank, Jim Feyrer, Ross Levine, Avner Greif, Jeremiah Dittmar, David Weil, Sandip Sukhtankar, Quamrul Ashraf, Oded Galor, Ed Kutsoati, Pauline Grosjean, Hans-Joachim Voth, Enrico Perotti, Pedro Dal Bo, Nathan Nunn, Raquel Fernandez, Jim Robinson, and Enrico Spolaore. We are particularly thankful to Andy Zeitlin, Melissa Dell, Andrei Shleifer, Nico Voightlander, Daron Acemoglu, and seven anonymous referees for detailed comments and useful suggestions. We also thank Nathan Nunn for providing the digitized version of Murdock's Tribal Map of Africa. This paper draws on material from Michalopoulos and Papaioannou ("Divide and Rule or the Rule of the Divided?" 2011). All errors are our sole responsibility. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• July 31, 2012