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Publications (20)
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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...
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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...
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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 defines a role for human rights and human rights workers in the discussion of humanitarian emergencies. The approach is to look at how human rights law, monitoring, and information can be useful in two ways: (1) to warn of an impending humanitarian emergency, and (2) as part of efforts to...
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– An Econometric Investigation into the Sources of Humanitarian Emergencies
This paper uses econometric methods and case-study evidence to examine the political economy of complex humanitarian emergencies, multidimensional crises characterized by warfare, state violence, disease, hunger, and displacement. We emphasize that economic variables often become salient through...
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This paper explains correlations between humanitarian emergencies and political economies of 'failing states' in Liberia and Sierra Leone. In both, Cold War era rulers acquired personal power through their influence over economic exchange, irrespective of conventional public/private distinctions...
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– The Political Economy of Emergency in Haiti
Towards the Abyss? The Political Economy of Emergency in Haiti analyzes the various factors that have contributed to create a protracted humanitarian emergency situation in Haiti. The first section deals with the economic causes, the interplay between population growth, erosion and falling rural...
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– The Political Economy of Humanitarian Emergencies
This paper uses econometric methods and case-study evidence to examine the political economy of complex humanitarian emergencies, multidimensional crises characterized by warfare, disease, hunger, and displacement. We find that stagnation and decline in real GDP, high income inequality, inflation...
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This diagnostic study explores the political conditions that are associated with humanitarian emergencies. It employs a risk rather than cause-effect methodology. Humanitarian emergencies are not random events. They occur most frequently in states having the following characteristics: i) more than...
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– Lessons from El Salvador
This paper develops and tests five hypotheses regarding the economic causes of complex humanitarian emergencies (CHEs). We argue that: (1) such emergencies, involving large-scale deaths and population displacements, are most likely to occur when growth is slow, negative, or falls far short of...
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– A Case of a Humanitarian Emergency
The recent history of Zaire presents a unique opportunity to understand and explain humanitarian emergencies. This monograph follows an inductive approach in analysing the trajectory of state-building in Zaire as a significant explanatory variable of humanitarian emergencies. By tracing the sources...
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– Insights from the Interface of State, Democracy and Civil Society
This paper provides a beginning toward explaining why humanitarian emergencies have been so substantial in the post-cold war era, a period expected to be less violent. The humanitarian emergencies of the contemporary period tend to be state-centred, focus on identity claims, and occur in developing...
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