Filter by...
Reset all
Publications (28)
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
This paper analyses the trends in within-country inequality during the post-World War II period, with particular attention to the last 20 years, on the basis of a review of the relevant literature and of an econometric analysis of inequality trends in 73 countries accounting for 80 per cent of the...
Working Paper
pdf
Inequality has risen in many countries over the last two decades, especially in the transition economies, but also in many developing and developed economies. This is disturbing since little progress can be made in poverty reduction when inequality is high and rising. Moreover, contrary to earlier...
Working Paper
pdf
– Evidence and Interpretation
Until recently, the literature on income inequality within countries suggested that trends in this area had remained stable over the last few decades, and that there is no relation between changes in inequality on the one side and domestic and external liberalization on the other. Against this...
Working Paper
pdf
This study evaluates the impact of the over seventy Social Funds (SFs) which were introduced since the mid-1980s to offset the surge in poverty spurred by adjustment. SFs benefited from greater visibility and financial support by the donor community than traditional social security programmes, and...
Working Paper
pdf
As seen from the year 2001, economic policy in developing and post-socialist economies during the preceding 10-15 years had one dominating theme - external 'liberalization' or the drastic lowering or removal of long-standing barriers to almost all international transactions in markets for goods and...
Working Paper
pdf
This paper reviews income distribution in developing (and transition) countries in recent decades. On average, before-tax income distribution is less unequal in developing countries than it is in industrial countries. However, unlike industrial countries, developing countries in general have not...
Working Paper
pdf
– A Critical Analysis
Much of the vast literature on changes in income distribution in advanced countries during the last two decades attributes these either to globalization (specifically in the form of trade liberalization with low-wage developing countries), or to skill-biased technology, or to a combination of the...
Working Paper
pdf
– What Are the New Insights after the Washington Consensus?
The economic reform policies in the 1980s and the 1990s under the so-called Washington Consensus have recently led to growing concern for inequality. This paper looks at some of the labour market outcomes of the economic reform policies in terms of inequality. The paper argues that labour market...
Working Paper
pdf
In this paper we propose to measure the inequality of educational achievements by constructing a Gini index on educational attainments. We then use the proposed measure to analyse the relationship between inequality in incomes and educational achievements (in terms of both the average attainments...
Displaying 16 of 28 results