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Publications (11)
Working Paper
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Social scientists are increasingly engaging in experimental research projects of importance for public policy in developing areas. While this research holds the possibility of producing major social benefits, it may also involve manipulating populations, often without consent, sometimes with...
Working Paper
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– Definitions and Diagrams
The fundamental problem of external validity is not to generalize from one experiment, so much as to experimentally test generalizable theories. That is, theories that explain the systematic variation of causal effects across contexts. Here we show how the graphical language of causal diagrams can...
Working Paper
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In recent years, randomized controlled trials have become increasingly popular in the social sciences. In development economics in particular, their use has attracted considerable debate in relation to the identification of ‘what works’ in development policy. This paper focuses on a core topic in...
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– Opportunities and Challenges
‘Ancillary experiments’ are a new technique whereby researchers use a completed experiment conducted by others to recover causal estimates of a randomized intervention on new outcomes. The method requires pairing new outcome data with randomized treatments the researchers themselves did not oversee...
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– Towards Experiments?
In examining the study of government performance, this paper asks whether field experiments can improve the explanatory precision of results generated by public opinion surveys. Survey research on basic health and education services sub-Saharan Africa shows that the perceived ‘user friendliness’ (or...
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– Experimental and Non-Experimental Methods in Development Economics
This paper provides a survey of six widely used non-experimental methods for estimating the impact of programmes in the context of developing economies (instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, direct matching, propensity score matching, linear regression and non-parametric methods, and...
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– Better Policies? Better Politics?
The paper provides a comparative analysis of the incidence of evaluation methods in antipoverty transfer programmes in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The paper identifies two broad explanations for the incidence of evaluation in antipoverty transfer programmes in developing countries, one...
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This paper analyzes the short-term effects of foreign capital flows on aggregate demand in Mexico: their magnitude, transmission channels, and the possible influence of the country’s choice of exchange rate regime. The study is motivated by the introduction of a floating system in December 1994, in...
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Using panel data, this paper explores the effects of openness to international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth. Fixed-effect and adjusted fixed-effect (regional-effect) estimations yield results consistent with the hypothesis of conditional convergence. FDI has a...
Working Paper
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– An Analysis of Knowledge Diffusion in Academic Journals
The thought that the academy might function like a ‘market place for ideas’ has been influential in the economics of science and is increasingly so in the philosophy of science/economic methodology literature. This paper contributes to this literature by examining one respect in which the academy...
Working Paper
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– An Econometric Study
The objectives of this paper are to examine the impact of liberalization on trade deficits and current accounts for developing economies. Attempts at liberalization in trade could lead to an increase in imports in the short run and this could cause both trade and current account deficits in...
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