GrowthChat is a podcast on the social and cultural journey of humankind, hosted by Marco Lecci and Sascha O. Becker.  In this episode we chat with Elias Papaioannou  about his paper "Pre-Colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development’”. Elias and his co-author, Stelios Michalopoulos, investigate the role of deeply rooted pre-colonial ethnic institutions in shaping comparative regional development within African countries. They find a strong positive association between pre-colonial political complexity and contemporary development