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Category: Social Sciences

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
Published June 29, 2011

What’s a Household, And Why It Matters for Development

“Household definitions used in multi-topic household surveys vary between surveys but have potentially significant implications for household composition, production, and poverty statistics. Standard definitions of the household usually include some intersection of keywords relating to residency requirements, common food consumption, and intermingling of income or production decisions. Despite best practices intending to standardize the definition of the household, it is unclear which types of definitions or which intersections of keywords in a definition result in different household compositions. This paper conducts a randomized survey experiment of four different household definitions in Mali to examine the implications for household-level statistics. This approach permits analysis of the trade-offs between alternative definition types. We find that additional keywords in definitions increase rather than decreases household size and significantly alters household composition. Definitions emphasizing common consumption or joint production increase estimates of the levels of household assets and consumption statistics, but not on per adult equivalency asset and consumption statistics, relative to open-ended definitions of the household. In contrast, definition type did not affect production statistics in levels, though we observe significant differences in per adult equivalency terms. Our findings suggest that variations in household definition have implications for measuring household welfare and production.”

Continue readingWhat’s a Household, And Why It Matters for Development