Poor infrastructure, health, and pervasive corruption constitute key constraints on African development. This dissertation includes three chapters devoted to these issues.

The first chapter estimates the effects of infrastructure on neo-natal health in Tanzania. Relying on 350 household surveys and 20,000 birth records I collected in Zanzibar, I show that a month-long blackout in the spring of 2008 reduced average birth weights for children born seven to nine months later and increased the probability of low birth weight. The analysis shows this was likely to have been caused by maternal under-nutrition induced by the temporary reduction in earnings during the blackout. Only women who were in the early stages of pregnancy were affected; they may not have known they were pregnant at the time of the blackout, and might have had fewer protections than visibly pregnant women. The effect of electricity failure on health directs attention to the importance of reliability of infrastructure in Africa.

The second chapter estimates the effect of the burden of disease on educational outcomes in the highlands of Ethiopia, using the 2004 Welfare Monitoring Survey and satellite-derived geographical information. I predict malaria prevalence in over 1,000 villages using air temperature, and estimate effects on schooling of children using instrumental variable techniques. I show that low-lying areas experience greater morbidity, and that this is largely driven by higher malaria incidence. This is associated with a large adverse effect on schooling: moving from a non-malarial village to one with average malaria incidence reduces children's schooling by 0.75 years.

The third chapter presents a theoretical analysis of the use of self-reporting in law enforcement when officers are corruptible. Self-reporting allows law breakers to preempt police detection by reporting the crime directly to the enforcement agency, thus avoiding a heavier punishment. The threat of police corruption highlights two additional advantages to self-reporting. First, by allowing individuals to self-report their unlawful act, the government increases social welfare by eliminating rents to its officers. Second, by reducing rents from corruption, it becomes cost effective to fully eliminate corruption by offering high-powered incentives.