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Publications (12)
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...
Working Paper
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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 transition to a market economy in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (FSU) has been associated with greater inequality and social stratification. Living standards have fallen for the majority of people, unemployment and poverty are high, the distribution of assets and earnings has...
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– The Case of Kyrgyzstan 1993-97
The transition from plan to market has fundamentally transformed the social structure in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. The small Central Asian Republic of Kyrgyzstan exemplifies these changes.Using data from nationally representative living standards measurement surveys in...
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Statistical and sociological evidence is gathered to display changes in social structure of the Czech society before and after 1989, with a special focus on economic inequalities. In the first part, frozen landscape of the communist regime is observed. Behind the facade of forced social homogeneity...
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– A Case Study of Social Stratification
Kyrgyzstan is one of the poorer countries undergoing transition from a centrally planned to a market economy. Unlike its neighbour Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan followed a rather radical reform strategy, introduced liberal macroeconomic reforms and large-scale privatization. Having laid major foundations...
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The paper finds that a new system of social stratification is emerging in rural China in the wake of economic reforms, one that is far less equal than what preceded it. As part of this trend, wealth inequality has increased markedly in a short period of time. A relatively equal distribution of land...
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