LEAP has two candidates on the economics job market this year: Gabriel Brown and Tim Ngalande.
Gabriel is a postdoctoral fellow. His job-market paper on Bible translations in Africa combines a new dataset on missions, language and infrastructure with careful identification to show how writing down vernacular languages shaped colonial investment and long-run education and health.
Tim has just submitted his PhD. It builds new twentieth-century data for South African mining and manufacturing, and uses growth accounting, structural modelling and quasi-experimental evidence to measure how apartheid’s labour and transport institutions misallocated talent and cost the economy in productivity.
