Cohort Profile: Kenya Life Panel Survey

Eric Hsu, Edward Miguel, Eric Ochieng, and Michael Walker
2026
African DevelopmentEducation and Human Capital

Forthcoming in the International Journal of Epidemiology

– The Kenya Life Panel Survey (KLPS) is a multigenerational longitudinal dataset originally
designed to assess the impacts of a school-based deworming programme in Busia
District, Kenya initially implemented in 1998-2001.
– Individuals in the original cohort were students attending one of 75 primary schools in
Busia District in 1998. This cohort of 7527 individuals was later expanded to also
include 5153 biological children of the original cohort members.
– In 2025, members of the original cohort were aged 34 to 45, and second-generation
members were aged 7 to 15. Baseline data were collected from original cohort
participants in 1998-2001, with five rounds of follow-up data collected between 2003
and 2025. Baseline data on second-generation cohort members were collected in
2017-2021, with follow-up data collected in 2023-2025.
– Data include information about education, employment, health, migration, cognition,
and expenditures, among other outcomes. Each follow-up round achieved an effective
survey rate between 80% and 85% of the original cohort. While all original cohort
members resided in rural areas at baseline, considerable migration has led 38% of
them to live in a city by 2023, and some have moved to other countries.

Access the working paper here.

Working Paper Citation:
Hsu, E., Miguel, E., Ochieng, E., & Walker, M. (2026). Cohort profile: Kenya Life Panel Survey. Escholarship.Org. https://doi.org/10.26085/C3160N

Data are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/KLPS.

Climate Change, Conflict, and the Risk of Economic Collapse in Africa

Joel Ferguson, Marshall Burke, Edward Miguel, and Solomon Hsiang
2026
Environment and Climate

Forthcoming in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Is human-caused climate change likely to trigger enduring economic decline in modern societies? We study whether changes in violent conflict and economic growth caused by warming could interact to degrade economic opportunities and trap African countries in poverty. We provide evidence of an emerging high-conflict, low-growth “poverty trap” equilibrium in Africa and describe theoretically how such an equilibrium could result from warming. We then combine historical data on temperature, growth, and conflict with projections from a large ensemble of global climate models to evaluate the risk that warming and subsequent conflict could push African economies into a regime of sustained negative economic growth. We find that the risk of such “economic collapse” is material under a moderate-to-high emissions scenario. We estimate that in Africa, a current “high” emissions trajectory (RCP 7.0) may increase the incidence of conflict by 5.1 percentage points (95% CI: 0.2–13.0) and increase the share of countries with net negative GDP growth this century by 12.2 percentage points (95% CI: 2.0–27.5). We calculate that roughly 82% of this additional conflict risk and 14% of projected GDP losses are due to interacting effects between these two outcomes — underscoring the importance of accounting for their indirect effects and feedbacks. Our findings suggest that an unprecedented scale of emissions mitigation, economic policy innovation, or institutional investment would be required to contain the risk of catastrophic human impacts from climate change in many African countries.

Preparing for an Aging Africa: Data-Driven Priorities for Economic Research and Policy

Madeline Duhon, Edward Miguel, Amos Njuguna, Daniela Pinto Veizaga, and Michael Walker
2026
African DevelopmentHealth
737243.pdf

Duhon, M., Miguel, E., Njuguna, A., Veizaga, D. P., & Walker, M. (2026). Preparing for an aging africa: Data-Driven priorities for economic research and policy. Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, 4(3). https://doi.org/10.1086/737243

The over 60 population in sub-Saharan Africa is expected to triple between 2020 and 2050. Yet few African countries have implemented policies to support older populations, and little research in economics has specifically examined aging in the region despite the need for evidence to inform the design of effective policies. This paper conducts original data analysis to characterize the challenges and opportunities facing older Africans and combines this with insights from a cross-disciplinary evidence review to identify four key facts and three paths forward for the design of health care systems, pensions, and other programs to prepare for an aging Africa.

Reproducibility and robustness of economics and political science research

Abel Brodeur, Derek Mikola, Nikolai Cook, Edward Miguel, Fernando Hoces de la Guardia et.al
2026
Research Methodology
s41586-026-10251-x.pdf

Brodeur, A., Mikola, D., Cook, N. et al. Reproducibility and robustness of economics and political science research. Nature 652, 151–156 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10251-x

Science aspires to be cumulative. Reproducibility efforts strengthen science by testing the reliability of published findings, promoting self-correction, and informing policy-making1. Computational reproductions, whereby independent researchers reproduce the results of published studies, are an essential diagnostic tool. Such efforts should have greater visibility. However, little social science reproduction and robustness has been conducted at scale. Here we reproduced original analyses and conducted robustness checks of 110 articles that were published in leading economics and political science journals with mandatory data and code sharing policies. We found that more than 85% of published claims were computationally reproducible. In robustness checks, our reanalyses showed that 72% of statistically significant estimates remain significant and in the same direction, and the median reproduced effect size is nearly the same as the originally published effect size (that is, 99% of the published effect size). Additionally, 6 independent research teams examined 12 pre-specified hypotheses about determinants of robustness. Research teams with more experience found lower levels of robustness, and robustness did not correlate with author characteristics or data availability.

Scaling Agricultural Policy Interventions

Lauren Falcao Bergquist, Benjamin Faber, Thibault Fally, Matthias Hoelzlein, Edward Miguel, Andres Rodriguez-Clare
2026
African DevelopmentResearch Methodology
ECMA scaling.pdf

Berquist, Lauren Falcao, Benjamin Faber, Thibault Fally, Matthias Hoelzlein, Edward Miguel, Andres Rodriguez-Clare. (2026). “Scaling Agricultural Policy Interventions”.

Policies to raise agricultural productivity have been central in the fight against global poverty. Their impacts are often measured in experiments that provide strong causal identification but may be too small-scale to capture general equilibrium effects that arise when policies are scaled up. We develop a quantitative model of agricultural trade, featuring a granular economic geography, that combines parameters estimated from small-scale experiments with rich administrative microdata to quantify how treatment effects change when policies are scaled up. Applying this framework to input subsidies in Uganda, we find that average welfare gains fall by about 20% when implemented at scale. However, gains increase among the poorest households, as returns shift from land to labor, reducing the regressivity of the intervention by more than half. We examine how these forces vary with household and market characteristics and the geographic scale of implementation, with implications for randomized saturation designs.