In this project I revisit the findings of Michalopoulos & Papaioannou (2014), exploring the role of national institutions on local development levels in Africa. The authors use 3rd and 4th degree RD polynomials, define the bandwidth of their RD design in arbitrary ways, and there are some pixels were the distance to the border is not computed properly, so to overcome those flaws and check how robust their findings are, I plan to use the optrdd package from Imbens & Wager (2019) to estimate an Optimized Regression Discontinuity model, a data-driven model that doesn’t rely on polynomial or bandwidth definitions.