Stelios Michalopoulos from Brown is our seminar speaker this Friday. His talk will be on “Ethnic Inequality” (link here and abstract below) in Lillis 111 from 3:30-5pm.

Stelios is a fast rising development economist working on the empirical-macro side. He received his PhD from Brown in 2008 with creative use of nighttime lights intensity data and a quasi-natural experiment to ask whether culture or national institutions is better at explaining Africa’s development. By comparing same tribes across the national boundaries that were drawn ad hoc at the 1884-85 Berlin conference, he finds the explanation is culture. A paper from his dissertation was published in Econometrica last year, another in the AER.