Skip to content

Month: January 2011

Published January 26, 2011

Contributing to Public Goods: Primers on Regression and Causality

If you teach a field course (e.g., international development) 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.

For example, many of the undergraduates who sign up for my fall seminar on the Microeconomics of International Development Policy 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 for me to assign papers in World Development to be discussed in class, 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.

Continue readingContributing to Public Goods: Primers on Regression and Causality
Published January 25, 2011

Economic Growth Seen from Outer Space

Laura Freschi over at Aid Watch has just posted an interesting map that shows the amount of light that can be seen from outer space and which Henderson et al. (NBER, 2009) have used as a proxy for economic growth.

The map of the world is interesting in itself, but I find the 1992 and 2008 maps of the Korean peninsula to be more impressive, as they show how much economic growth took place in South Korea, but not in North Korea. Likewise, the map of Rwanda before, during, and after the genocide of 1994 is impressive.

(H/T: Eric Green, via Twitter)