History Matters: The Long-Term Impact of Colonial Public Investments in French West Africa
利用新数据库和殖民投资政策的空间不连续性，研究发现早期殖民投资对当前区域结果有巨大且持续的影响，且投资类型（教育、健康、基础设施）的影响各异，主要渠道是投资的持续累积。
To what extent do colonial public investments continue to influence current regional inequalities in French-speaking West Africa? Using a new database and the spatial discontinuities of colonial investment policy, this paper gives evidence that early colonial investments had large and persistent effects on current outcomes. The nature of investments also matters. Current educational outcomes have been more specifically determined by colonial investments in education rather than health and infrastructures, and vice versa. I show that a major channel for this historical dependency is a strong persistence of investments; regions that got more at the early colonial times continued to get more.