Syllabus

Syllabus

2nd PODER Summer School
"Recent Advances in Impact Evaluation for Development"

30 June-3 July, Paris School of Economics

Main Speakers
Esther Duflo (MIT and CEPR)
Orazio Attanasio (UCL and CEPR)
Martin Ravallion (Georgetown University)

Course Outline, Slides & Reading

Part 1: New Frontiers in Political Economy and in Experiments: Helping Governments work Better  - Esther Duflo

Lecture 1: Enforcing Environmental Regulation (slides)

  1. Duflo, Esther, Michael Greenstone, Rohini Pande, Nicholas Ryan, 2013. “Truth-telling by Third-Party Auditors and the Response of Polluting Firms: Experimental Evidence from India”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1499–1545.
  2. Duflo, Esther, Michael Greenstone, Rohini Pande, Nicholas Ryan, 2014 “The Value of Regulatory Discretion: Estimates from Environmental Inspections in India”, NBER Working Paper 20590.

Lecture 2: The power of transparency (slides)

  1. Banerjee, Abhijit, Rema Hanna, Jordan Kyle, Benjamin Olken, Sudarno Sumarto. 2015. “The Power of Transparancey: Information, Identification Cards and Food Subsidy Programs in Indonesia”, NBER Working Paper 20923.
  2. Muralidharan, Karthik, Paul Niehaus, Sandip Sukhtankar, 2014 “Building State Capacity: Evidence from Biometric Smartcards in India, NBER Working Paper 19999.
  3. Banerjee, Abhijit, Esther DUflo, Clement Imbert, Santhosh Mathew, Rohini Pande, 2014 “Can E-Governance Reduce Capture of Public Programs? Experimental Evidence from a Financial Reform of India's Employment Guarantee”, mimeo

Part 2: Structural models and experimental methods: complements or substitutes?  - Orazio P. Attanasio

Lecture 1. (slides)

  1. Endogeneity and causality in economics: the case for Randomized Controlled Trials.
  2. What can and what can’t be learned from a RCT.
  3. The PROGRESA evaluation: Conditional Cash Transfers and School Enrollment.
    1. Using an RCT to validate a structural model
    2. Using a structural model to extrapolate the results of a RCT.
  4. Technical Digression I. Different types of randomizations:
    1. Individual level
    2. Clustered randomization.

Lecture 2.  Human capital accumulation: the case of stimulation. Using a structural model to understand the impact of a RCT. (slides)

  1. The experiment and its impacts.
  2. A model of HK accumulation.
  3. Estimating part of the model: what variation?
  4. Interpreting the results of the experiment.
  5. Technical Digression II. Multiple hypothesis testing.
  6. Technical Digression III. Eliciting subjective expectations
  7. Eliciting beliefs

Readings:

Attanasio, Orazio P., 2009. "Expectations and Perceptions in Developing Countries: Their Measurement and Their Use," American Economic Review, 99(2), pages 87-92, May.

Attanasio, Orazio P.  & Costas Meghir & Ana Santiago, 2012. "Education Choices in Mexico: Using a Structural Model and a Randomized Experiment to Evaluate PROGRESA," Review of Economic Studies, 79(1), pages 37-66.

Attanasio, Orazio, Camila Fernández, Emla Fizsimons, Sally Grantham-McGregor, Costas Meghir, and Marta Rubio-Codina. 2014. "Using the Infrastructure of a Conditional Cash Transfer Program to Deliver a Scalable Integrated Early Childhood Development Program in Colombia: Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial." BMJ 349:g5785. 

Attanasio, Orazio, 2015 – EEA Presidential address, “The Determinants Of The Accumulation Of Human Capital In Developing Countries” 

Attanasio, Orazio & Sarah Cattan & Emla Fitzsimons & Costas Meghir & Marta Rubio-Codina, 2015. "Estimating the Production Function for Human Capital: Results from a Randomized Control Trial in Colombia," NBER Working Papers 20965

Cunha, F., I. Elo, and J. Culhane (2013). Eliciting maternal beliefs about the technology of skill formation. NBER Working Paper No 19144.

Cunha, Flavio, “Recent Developments in the Estimation of Production Functions of Skills, Fiscal Studies, Vol. 32(2), pp. 297-316, June/2011.

Cunha, Flavio, James J. Heckman and Susanne M. Schennach, “Estimating the Technology of Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Skill Formation”, Econometrica, Vol. 78(3), pp. 883-931, May/2010.

Deaton, Angus 2010. "Instruments, Randomization, and Learning about Development," Journal of Economic Literature, 48(2), pages 424-55, June.

Manski, Charles F. 2004. "Measuring Expectations," Econometrica, 72(5), pages 1329-1376, 09.

Todd, Petra E.  & Kenneth I. Wolpin, 2006, "Assessing the Impact of a school subsidy program in Mexico: Using a social experiment to validate a dynamic behavioral model of child schooling and fertility", American Economic Review, Vol. 96, 2006, Issue 5, 1384-1417.

Part 3: Evaluating Large Antipoverty Programs

Martin Ravallion

Lectures 1 and 2: Social policies. (slides)

After introducing some general principles, the lecture will discuss a series of series of case studies on specific social policies using cash transfers and workfare. This will also include the use of structural models to inform social policy making.  The programs studied will include China’s Di Bao program and India’s National Employment Guarantee Program.

Lecture 3: Poor area development programs. (slides)

Thus lecture will turn to studying the longer-term impacts of policies that try to help lagging poor areas. The bulk of the discussion will be a case study of one such poor area program, a large World Bank funded program in China.

Case-studies from evaluations of full-scale programs will be presented, illustrating the methods for real-word social policies and poor-area development programs.  For background reading on the principles of impact evaluation in this context:

Ravallion, Martin “Evaluating Anti-Poverty Programs,” in Handbook of Development Economics Volume 4, edited by Paul Schultz and John Strauss, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 2008. (To be provided to students.)

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