Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (45)
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
– Are Developing Countries Different?
Factors determining the diffusion of digital mobile telephony across 200 developed and developing countries in the 1990s are studied with the aid of a Gompertz model. The market size and network effects are found to play more important roles in the developing countries; there is also more need for...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Importance of ICT and Democratization
Foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased dramatically in recent years. However, the distribution of FDI is highly unequal and very poor countries face major difficulties in attracting foreign investors. This paper investigates the determinants of FDI inflows to developing countries, with a...
Working Paper
pdf
A firm’s business model describes the way in which it creates, delivers, and appropriates value. In the debate about the ongoing demise of several e-commerce ventures, only a few analysts have looked at the relative sanity of innovative e-business Models, relying mostly on static environmental...
Working Paper
pdf
– A Critical Review
This paper offers a critical review of the conventional economic classification, measurement and valuation of output, and related performance indicators, for the service sector. The paper also explores and contrasts long-standing views on the service knowledge base and service innovations, as well...
Working Paper
pdf
– Is It an IT Story?
This paper examines trends in idiosyncratic risk in different ‘new economy’ and ‘old economy’ industries, and explores whether these developments can be attributed to the use of IT. A CAPM-based decomposition of equity returns is employed to estimate idiosyncratic risk. The results provide evidence...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper assesses the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their impact on the economic performance of small- and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) of three East African countries: Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Findings of the paper suggest that the diffusion of ICT among East...
Working Paper
pdf
– Regime Formation and the Impact on Africa
This paper combines a theoretical perspective on globalization and the information society with a critical usage of international regime theory in order to contribute to a better understanding of the current historical period of transition from an international telecommunications regime to a new and...
Working Paper
pdf
The pervasiveness of the illegal copying of software is a worldwide phenomenon. Software piracy implies a huge loss of potential customers of original software buyers, which directly translates into revenue losses for the software industry. Given this, conventional wisdom would suggest the need for...
Working Paper
pdf
We examine the relationship between the directly observable indicator of new technology, ICT investment ratio, and skill upgrading by analysing changes in employment and wage structure of 25 Korean industrial sectors over the 1993-99 period. The results show that there has been little relationship...
Displaying 16 of 45 results