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Publications (23)
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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– A New Approach to Development Policy
Successful development programs rely on people to behave and choose in certain ways, and behavioral economics helps us understand why people behave and choose as they do. Approaching problems in development using behavioral economics thus leads to better diagnosis and to better-designed solutions...
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– A Research Review and Agenda
The poor can and do save, but often use formal or informal instruments that have high risk, high cost, and limited functionality. This could lead to undersaving compared to a world without market or behavioural frictions. Undersaving can have important welfare consequences: variable consumption, low...
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In this paper we argue that the recent evidence on individuals’ decision making is of high relevance for the measurement of poverty when switching from a static and certain to a dynamic and uncertain framework. The numerous proposed measures of multi-period poverty and vulnerability have until now...
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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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– an Experimental Study from Ethiopia
An experimental design using treatments of a voluntary contribution mechanism is used to test household efficiency. Efficiency is decisively rejected in all treatments contrary to the assumption of most household models. Information on initial endowments of spouses improves efficiency only in some...
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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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We provide an axiomatic treatment of the measurement of economic insecurity, assuming that individual insecurity depends on the current wealth level and its variations experienced in the past. The first component plays the role of a buffer stock to rely on in case of an adverse future event. The...
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– the Kin System as a Mechanism of Income-Hiding Between Spouses in Rural Ghana
I present a model of intra-household allocation to show that when income is not perfectly observed by both spouses, hiding of income can occur even when revelation increases bargaining power. I draw data from Ghana and exploit the variation in the degree of asymmetric information between spouses...
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We analyse rural household livelihood and children’s school enrollment decisions in a post-conflict setting in the Chittagong Hill Tracts region of Bangladesh. The innovation of the paper lies in the fact that we employ information about current subjective perceptions regarding the possibility of...
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This paper examines the measurement of social welfare, poverty and inequality taking into account features that have been found to be important welfare determinants in behavioural economics. Most notably, we incorporate reference-dependence, loss aversion and diminishing sensitivity—aspects...
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– Relative Status, Ceremonies and Early Child Development in China
Presenting gifts at funerals, weddings, and other ceremonies held by fellow villagers have been regarded as social norms in Chinese villages for thousands of years. However, it is more burdensome for the poor to take part in these social occasions than for the rich. Because the poor often lack the...
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