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Publications (29)
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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– An Empirical Assessment of the Indian Economy
This study is an attempt towards an integration of financial development and its effect on the real sector via the transmission mechanism with special reference to developing and emerging market economies. It finds two cointegrating relations between the financial development, output growth and...
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Since 1992 Ethiopia has been engaged in liberalizing its financial sector. The hallmark of the strategy is gradualism. The approach is not without problems especially from Bretton Woods Institutions that saw the reform as a sluggish process. This study examines this liberalization program by...
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Since the 1990s economists have devoted considerable attention to the study of the relationship between financial markets development and economic growth. In particular, the emergence of stock markets with economic development is an intriguing and interesting aspect of such a relationship, and yet...
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– The Experience of Morocco
Using a vector error-correction model, I explore the short-run dynamics and long-run linkages between financial reform and the mobilization of domestic saving in Morocco. In the short run, financial depth (volume of intermediation) is shown to have a positive influence on private saving, while...
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– A Risk-Cost Configuration Approach
The paper examines the source of financial market fragmentation in sub-Saharan Africa in the framework of institutional economics. Based on fieldwork data from Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, and Tanzania, it analyses financial risk management, the transaction costs for loan screening and monitoring, and...
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– Empirical Evidence from a Private Bank in Vietnam
This paper deals with loan contracting from a private bank in Vietnam. We focus on the main loan contract features that the bank uses in lending to business firms, namely loan maturity, collateral and loan interest rate. Based upon the simultaneous equation model of Dennis et al. (2000) and the bank...
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– The Chinese Experience
This paper documents the financial and institutional developments of China during the past two decades, when China was successfully transformed from a rigid central-planning economy to a dynamic market economy following its unique path. We empirically examine the relationship between financial...
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We provide a novel empirical analysis of the South Korean credit market that reveals large volumes of excess credit since the late 1970s, indicating that a sizeable proportion of total credit was being used to refinance unprofitable projects. Our findings are consistent with theoretical literature...
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– A Household Level Analysis
In this paper, using the rich household panel data of urban and rural Ethiopia that covers the period from 1994 to 2000, we attempted to establish the link between finance and poverty in Ethiopia. Our results show that access to finance is an important factor in consumption smoothing and hence...
Displaying 16 of 29 results