Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (33)
Working Paper
pdf
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...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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...
Working Paper
pdf
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...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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...
Working Paper
pdf
– 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...
Working Paper
pdf
– Methodology and Evidence from Three Developing Countries
This paper implements a methodology for estimating poverty in Ecuador, Madagascar and South Africa, at levels of disaggregation that to date have not generally been available. The methodology is based on a statistical procedure to combine household survey data with population census data, imputing...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper studies growth and inequality in China and India—two economies that account for a third of the world’s population. By modelling growth and inequality as components in a joint stochastic process, the paper calibrates the impact each has on different welfare indicators and on the personal...
Working Paper
pdf
The paper examines the linkages between gender of household heads, education and household poverty in Nigeria between 1980 and 1996. Data analyzed were obtained from four national consumer expenditure surveys conducted in Nigeria in 1980, 1985, 1992 and 1996 by the Federal Office of Statistics...
Working Paper
pdf
In many OECD countries income inequality has risen, but surprisingly redistribution has as well. The theory attributes this partly to the redistributive effect of education spending. In the model income inequality and growth depend in an inverted U-shaped way on education. To maintain a given level...
Working Paper
pdf
How much does economic growth contribute to poverty reduction? I discuss analytical and empirical approaches to assess the poverty elasticity of growth, and emphasize that the relationship between growth and poverty change is non-constant. For a given poverty measure, it depends on initial...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence from Southeast Asia
In recent decades, absolute poverty incidence declined in most countries of Southeast Asia, even though in some of these countries inequality increased at the same time. This paper examines the relationship between these outcomes and the rate of economic growth in the agricultural, industrial and...
Working Paper
pdf
– A General Equilibrium Analysis for Indonesia
Do changes in poverty and inequality depend directly on the rate of economic growth, or does the source of the growth also matter? This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model of the Indonesian economy to explore this question by simulating increases in GDP arising from (i) technical...
Working Paper
pdf
– A Case Study of Pakistan
While globalization is viewed as a key to future economic development, it is also argued that it increases poverty, threatens employment and living standards of the poor. Like many other developing countries, Pakistan also attempted to integrate its economy in the global economy through liberalizing...
Working Paper
pdf
– Misspecified Policies and Estimates
Specification counts in the formulation of any economic problem, estimation of its magnitude and its assessment. This is particularly so for problems in the context of economic development. Solutions for poverty alleviation in developing countries like India are often formulated under misspecified...
Displaying 16 of 33 results