Africa Table - The Politics of Order in Informal Markets: Evidence From Lagos

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Join the Center for African Studies for our weekly lunchtime lecture series.

Speaker: Shelby Grossman, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Stanford University

Shelby Grossman is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Her research focuses on the political economy of development. In her dissertation, which uses original survey data collected in Lagos, Nigeria from 1,878 randomly sampled traders, along with market case studies, she investigates the conditions under which private organizations will promote economic activity. She finds that strong markets maintain sophisticated institutions to support trade not in the absence of government, but rather as a response to active state interference. Shelby has additional projects in Nigeria looking at whether reputation affects contracting frictions (with Meredith Startz), and on the politics of non-compliance with polio vaccination (with Jonathan Phillips and Leah Rosenzweig). Shelby earned her PhD in Government from Harvard in 2016 and holds a B.A. from Emory.