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Category: Methods

Published September 6, 2011

“Big Questions, Not Project Evaluations”: Blattman on Impact Evaluation

This week in my development seminar, we will be discussing the background ideas and methods proper to development microeconomics.

In order to do so, and to make sure that everyone has a clear understanding of what’s at stake, I must make a necessary digression about the use of linear regression as well as about the idea of causality in the social sciences.

As such, a recent post on impact evaluation by Chris Blattman turns out to be quite timely:

“My point in 2008: to talk about how impact evaluations could better serve the needs of policymakers, and accelerate learning.

Frankly, the benefits of the simple randomized control trial have been (in my opinion) overestimated. But with the right design and approach, they hold even more potential than has been promised or realized.

Continue reading“Big Questions, Not Project Evaluations”: Blattman on Impact Evaluation

Published September 6, 2011

“Hope and Hype Outpace Proven Treatments”: Sounds Familiar?

You would think this New York Times article is about aid and development, especially when glancing at the subtitles (“A Theory Becomes a Fad,” “Conflicting Studies,” “The Next Big Thing”), but I guarantee it’s not:

“But now researchers are questioning many of the procedures, including new ones that often have no rigorous studies to back them up.

Continue reading“Hope and Hype Outpace Proven Treatments”: Sounds Familiar?

Published August 18, 2011

For Fellow Teachers: Revised Primers on Linear Regression and Causality

If you teach in a policy school or in a political science department, chances are some of your students are not quite conversant in the quantitative methods used in the social sciences.

Many of the students who sign up for my fall seminar on the Microeconomics of International Development Policy or my spring seminar on Law, Economics and Organization, for example, are incredibly bright, but they are not familiar with regression analysis, and so they don’t know how to read a regression table. This makes it difficult to assign empirical papers in World Development for in-class discussion, let alone papers in the Journal of Development Economics.

While I do not have the time to teach basic econometrics to students in those seminars, I have prepared two handouts for them to read in preparation for reading papers containing empirical results, which I thought I should make available to anyone who would rather not spend precious class time teaching the basics of quantitative methods. I have used both these handouts in my development seminar last fall, and my students said that they had learned quite a bit from reading them.

Given that many of us are spending these days revising our syllabus for the fall semester, I have revised my empirical handouts for the new academic year, and I am happy to make them available to whoever wants to use them. If you use them, I simply request that you do not modify them and that you let me know about how I can improve them for next year.

Continue readingFor Fellow Teachers: Revised Primers on Linear Regression and Causality