‘Mechanism mapping’ for policy design

I just finished reading a recent working paper by Martin Williams, titled “External validity and policy adaptation: From impact evaluation to policy design”. In this paper, Martin tackles the question – how will a policymaker apply evidence available to her to design a policy/programme that will fix a particular problem at hand? He first takes …

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Defending Liberia’s right to experiment, and a few questions

Liberia continues to attract criticism for its Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL) pilot. Here is a recent news report  already pronouncing the verdict on the programme: Coalition for Transparency and Accountability in Education (COTAE) said in its report released last week Wednesday that the PPP is gradually but emphatically proving to be a failure and …

A view on Hope; and a pertinent question to randomistas

...What concerns me is that the direct interventions that are targeted towards addressing such psycho-social constraints are not highlighted or even mentioned as they are not neat enough for RCT measurement. Instead the reliance is on the outcome variables and a black box of intervention package which is not very helpful for intervention design. Short …

The I-Told-You-So test for research questions

A few weeks back, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) (my former employer) posed this question to readers with reference to two small and micro-enterprises (SME) studies in Ghana and Mexico (RCTs, of course) -In the summer issue of SSIR, we will discuss the results of these two studies in more detail. But here, we’d like YOU to predict …

Insights into female voting behaviour in rural Pakistan

Chris Blattman flags a new World Bank paper by Ghazala Mansuri and Xavier Gine. The authors find that information dissemination (of the nature of pre-election voting awareness camapigns) increased voting among women by about 12% on average. Alongside this enhanced political participation, women also displayed greater degrees of independent decision-making when it came to voting for their chosen …

More praise for Esther Duflo

Chris Udry, writing about Esther, says - There are few precedents for Esther in our profession; right from the start of her career as a new assistant professor, she has taken on a rare combination of professional roles as a cutting-edge researcher, a catalyst of research for a new generation of scholars, a policy activist, and …

Economists as anthropologists

...In fact, the most powerful moments in the book are almost touchingly old-fashioned. In the chapter on education, there is a poignant moment that tells you more about the ways in which our education system fails the poor than any randomised trial would. This is the moment where one of their interlocutors uses the phrase …