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Publications (54)
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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The paper examines the main issues involved in translating domestic bankruptcy procedures to the sovereign context. It considers some of the principles by which domestic bankruptcy procedures operate, and the extent to which they apply to international lending. Two recent proposals are considered in...
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– Issues, Approaches and Results
There is a widespread view that political criteria have received less emphasis in aid allocation since the end of the cold war, with a greater share of aid subsequently being based on developmental criteria. An observed increase in aid effectiveness is attributed to this shift. A reasonably large...
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– Conceptual Issues and Empirical Estimates
This paper is an attempt to rectify some of the problems that characterize most earlier studies that seek to explain private capital flows to developing countries or, at least, to examine the subject from a different and complementary perspective. To accomplish this, we propose a model framework...
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The study seeks to identify donor-specific factors that cause donors to delay aid disbursement, and to apply a double standard in dealing with the non-compliance of a recipient with regard to aid conditionalities, a practice that promotes uncertainty in the receipt of aid. Annual panel data over...
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– Approaches, Issues and Consequences
Studies of the inter-recipient allocation of aid may be categorized threefold. First, there are those which attempt to explain the observed allocation of aid. Second, there are those which seek to describe or evaluate the allocation of aid against normative criteria. Third, there are those which...
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– Determining Factors and Revealed Burden Sharing
The paper reports an empirical study of the factors affecting burden sharing among OECD’s 22 DAC members in ‘bankrolling’ the multilateral aid agencies. These are the UN agencies, World Bank’s IDA and non-IDA programmes, regional development banks, European Community, and other multilateral agencies...
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This paper models the inter-temporal allocation of foreign development aid to Papua New Guinea (PNG). A formal theoretical model of aid allocation is developed, in which aid to any one country is determined jointly with aid to all other recipient countries. This is recognized in the econometric...
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– Panoramic Issues and Empirical Evidence
The paper examines a wide range of issues relating to the mix between loans and grants as well as the degree of concessionality of loans. A number of empirical tests are carried out based on annual panel data over 1970 to 1999 for 22 donor countries and 72 recipient countries. Based on the tests, we...
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The paper empirically explores the factors that could have accounted for the generally declining aid effort (defined as the generosity ratio, or the share of GDP given as aid) of bilateral donors over the last three decades. Annual panel data over 1970-2000 period for the 22 DAC members are used in...
Displaying 16 of 54 results