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Publications (21)
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 studies the trend towards the use of securities as a vehicle to transfer capital to developing economies, and how it is linked to the increasing use of derivatives transactions in developing countries. It also provides a descriptive analysis of how each type of capital vehicle is...
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This paper explores the complementary use of two instruments to manage capital-account volatility in developing countries: capital-account regulations and counter-cyclical prudential regulation of domestic financial intermediaries. Capital-account regulations can provide useful instruments in terms...
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– An Overview
In this overview we try to explain, first, why funds continued to flow towards emerging economies while fundamentals in host countries had been deteriorating before the Asian crisis (rising external deficit, with a significant liquid component appreciating exchange rates; low capital formation...
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This paper addresses the nature of the demand schedule for emerging market assets in both its macroeconomic and microeconomic dimensions. The former is usually analysed in terms of the ‘push factors’ (such as interest rates or contagion) determining international capital flows; while the latter is...
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– Crossing the Border
This paper has two aims. The first is to provide some explanation for the extraordinary collapse in cross-border bank lending to developing countries which has taken place since 1997. The second is to argue that it might be too simplistic to characterize banks’ behaviour in the past few years as a...
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– The Experience of Latin America since the Tequila Crisis
The paper deals with changes in the regulation and supervision of the Latin American financial sector in the aftermath of the ‘Tequila Crisis’ of 1994–95. While it finds that both have improved, regulation and supervision cannot resolve all problems; good macroeconomic policy and performance are...
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– Water Flowing Uphill?
International bank lending is a major component of capital flows between advanced and emerging economies. However, in recent years these flows have been going the wrong way, like water flowing uphill. Even four years after the Asian crisis, there is a net flow of funds from emerging economies to...
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– A Review of the Literature, Empirical Evidence and some Policy Proposals
For many emerging market economies, over reliance on monetary policy may bring worse macro results, when compared to a more balanced framework of countercyclical fiscal and monetary policy. The use of countercyclical fiscal policy requires as a precondition solvent and sustainable fiscal accounts...
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– Issues, Implications and Policy Proposals
This paper argues that, if implemented in its current form, the new Basel Capital Accord will adversely effect developing sovereigns, corporates and banks wishing to borrow in international markets. This impact will result from the major banks’ lending patterns being altered by the adoption of...
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