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Publications (14)
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...
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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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Tracking poverty is predicated on the availability of comparable consumption data and reliable price deflators. However, regular series of strictly comparable data are only rarely available. Poverty prediction methods that track consumption correlates as opposed to consumption itself have been...
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The Impact of Multiple Imputation of Coarsened Data on Estimates on the Working Poor in South Africa
South African household surveys typically contain coarsened earnings data, which consist of a mixture of missing earnings values, point responses and interval-censored responses. This paper uses sequential regression multivariate imputation to impute missing and interval-censored values in the 2000...
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Macroeconomic instability has been increasingly considered as a factor lowering average income growth and, in this way, is a factor slowing down poverty reduction. But it can also result in slower poverty reduction for a given average rate of growth, due to poverty traps, often examined at the...
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– Income over Time, Aspirations and Reference Groups
How a person assesses the wellbeing derived from income is often determined as much by its contrast with a reference point as by the level of income itself. In this paper, I use a household survey from Mexico to examine how subjective poverty assessments not only depend on the absolute level of...
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We examine the measurement of individual poverty in an intertemporal context. Our aim is to capture the importance of persistence in a state of poverty and we characterize a corresponding individual intertemporal poverty measure. Our first axiom requires that intertemporal poverty is identical to...
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This paper demonstrates the implications of adopting an approach to measuring poverty that takes into account the lifetime experience of individuals rather than simply taking a static or cross-sectional perspective. Our approach follows the theoretical innovations in Hoy and Zheng (2008) which...
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The analysis of poverty dynamics yields important insights about the expected effectiveness of alternative social policies on poverty reduction. This paper analyses the effect of spell recurrence on poverty dynamics taking into account multiple poverty and non-poverty spells. Using longitudinal data...
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