Projects
The black box of preferences for political decision-making processes: who want to innovate within democracies and why? KU Leuven
Democratic innovations have been largely proposed as procedures with which address the democratic legitimacy deficit in advanced democracies. However, little is known empirically about the societal demand for these procedures. One of the objectives of this thesis is to open the black box of citizens’ process preferences in order to acquire knowledge on who and why some citizens demand participatory and deliberative reforms in order to improve ...
Road to Growth. University of Antwerp
Health issues in developing countries. KU Leuven
This PhD will entail a variety of studies based on health issues and their patterns of occurrence in Africa. Starting off, urbanization and dietary patterns will be analyzed in Tanzania. Firstly, a detailed dataset will be used to ascertain food consumption at the micronutrient level and determine whether diets are healthier and more fulfilling in urban compared to rural areas. Secondly, urbanization will be broken down into various levels in ...
Care organisation, a rethinking expedition in search for sustainability (CORTEXS). University of Antwerp
Culture and Economic Development. KU Leuven
This dissertation contains four chapters on comparative development, political economy, public economics and migration with focus on cultural values. The first chapter investigates the ancient origins of differences of cultural traits across countries; in particular, using a large set of measures of culture it identifies the cultural traits associated with genetic distances. The second chapter explores the direct and barrier effects of ...
Technology, value chains, and development: Evidence from Ethiopia. KU Leuven
The four chapters in this dissertation rely on unique data from a large-scale survey of the different value chain actors in Ethiopia for teff and coffee-arguably the most important crops in Ethiopia. While teff is the most widely grown cereal -accounting for about 24% of total crop area by itself (CSA, 2017/18), coffee is by far the most important single export item - accounting for about 30% of total export over last decade (NBE, ...
The relation between entrepreneurial performance of family firms and the moderating role of family involvement and governance characteristics University of Antwerp
Essays in development economics KU Leuven
This dissertation collects four essays that study how the environment in which people reside shapes their well-being and economic opportunities. Starting from the observation that, in spite of impressive growth accelerations in some resource-rich developing countries, human development indicators are lagging behind, the first two essays investigate how natural resource wealth affects government prioritization of human capital building. The ...