From Ugandan fields to colonial legacies: New evidence on productivity gaps, careers, and tolerance
Why are female-managed farms less productive than male-managed ones in Uganda? Can a mobile credit-and-savings account transform small businesses in Tanzania? How do young people decide which careers to pursue? And what explains persistent homophobia in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa?
These are some of the big questions tackled by IIES graduate student, Iacopo Bianchi, in his doctoral thesis "Productivity, Career Choice, and Colonial Legacies: Essays in Development Economics". Across four papers, Iacopo combines experiments, surveys and historical analysis to uncover hidden forces that shape development outcomes today.
Gendered frictions in Ugandan agriculture
One puzzle in Ugandan agriculture is why female-managed plots consistently report lower revenues than those managed by men. Is this because women pay more for labor, or because hired workers put in less effort?
Iacopo and co-authors ran three linked field experiments to separate access to from performance of labor. They find that women farmers face no clear price disadvantage when hiring labor — workers do not demand higher wages from them. However, when men and women farmers work with “mismatched” workers (e.g. a male worker works for a female farmer), subtle frictions emerge: agreements are slightly harder to reach, work quality can suffer, and women end up monitoring more closely.
These differences, while real, are too small to fully explain the productivity gap. The research suggests that gendered productivity divides are not simply about wages or worker shirking. They likely reflect a broader set of structural barriers women face in agriculture.
Digital finance alone isn’t a silver bullet
Mobile money has often been hailed as a revolution for small businesses in Africa. But does access to digital finance alone really transform women’s enterprises?
In Tanzania, Iacopo and co-authors encouraged women microentrepreneurs to take-up an interest-bearing mobile savings/credit account with or without accompanying business training. The findings are sobering: access alone boosted early use of the platform but didn’t lead to lasting gains in savings, sales, or profits. Skills mattered much more.
Women who also received business training improved their practices, were more likely to open secondary businesses, and over time reported higher sales and profits. The lesson: digital tools amplify potential, but without training, their transformative power is limited.
Why young Ugandans choose the jobs they do
Urban youth in Uganda face a maze of occupational choices. But how do they decide?
Surveying more than 1,000 young men and women, Iacopo and co-authors uncovered two forces at play: misinformation and family approval. Many young people overestimate how much others earn, and they are overly optimistic about their own prospects. Yet when given accurate information, they did not change their choices, but only adjusted their beliefs.
Instead, preferences (especially the desire for family approval) play a powerful role. For women, this often means avoiding male-dominated but higher-paying jobs. Simulations suggest that if family approval constraints were relaxed, the share of women choosing such jobs would rise by about 11%. The findings highlight how social norms, not just wages, shape the future of work.
Colonial legacies and attitudes toward homosexuality
Finally, Bianchi and co-authors turn to history to explain modern-day intolerance. Using a “co-ethnic border” design, they compare people of the same ethnic group split across colonial borders in Sub-Saharan Africa.
The results show that colonial legacies matter, but in context-specific ways. For example, British did not leave a much stronger negative imprint on attitudes if compared to French, and this holds true even within Cameroon, a country formerly split between the two colonial powers. But residents of Mozambique, an area once colonized by Portugal, are more tolerant than their British-ruled neighbors. Liberia, which escaped colonization, shows no clear differences with nearby colonized areas.
Colonialism’s impact, the research suggests, is not uniform. It intertwined with religion, ethnicity, and migration in ways that continue to shape social views today.
Rethinking Development
Taken together, these four studies remind us that development is rarely driven by a single lever —whether wages, technology, or colonial history. Instead, outcomes emerge from the interplay of information, preferences, skills, norms, and legacies.
By shining light on these forces, Iacopo’s thesis deepens our understanding of why gaps persist in productivity, opportunity, and tolerance, and what it might take to close them.
Iacopo Bianchi will defend his thesis on Thursday October 23 at 9.00.
Last updated: October 2, 2025
Source: Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES)