Showing 1 - 10 of 61
How large economic stimuli generate individual and aggregate responses is a central question in economics, but has not been studied experimentally. We provided one-time cash transfers of about USD 1000 to over 10,500 poor households across 653 randomized villages in rural Kenya. The implied...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012857666
Evidence from social psychology suggests that agents process information about their own ability in a biased manner. This evidence has motivated exciting research in behavioral economics, but has also garnered critics who point out that it is potentially consistent with standard Bayesian...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013125581
How should recipients of publicly-provided goods and services prove their identity in order to access these benefits? The core design challenge is managing the tradeoff between Type-II errors of inclusion (including corruption) against Type-I errors of exclusion whereby legitimate beneficiaries...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012841921
Improving “last-mile” public-service delivery is a recurring challenge in developing countries. Could the widespread adoption of mobile phones provide a scalable, cost-effective means for improvement? We use a large-scale experiment to evaluate the impact of phone-based monitoring on a...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012907441
Should developing countries give everyone enough money to live on? Interest in this idea has grown enormously in recent years, reflecting both positive results from a number of existing cash transfer programs and also dissatisfaction with the perceived limitations of piecemeal, targeted...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012891342
This paper makes the case for greater use of randomized experiments “at scale.” We review various critiques of experimental program evaluation in developing countries, and discuss how experimenting at scale along three specific dimensions – the size of the sampling frame, the number of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012945148
Anti-poverty programs in developing countries are often difficult to implement; in particular, many governments lack the capacity to deliver payments securely to targeted beneficiaries. We evaluate the impact of biometrically-authenticated payments infrastructure ("Smartcards") on beneficiaries...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013033929
Public employment programs may affect poverty through both the income they provide and their effects on private labor markets. We estimate both effects, exploiting a large-scale experiment randomized across 157 sub-districts (with an average population of 62,500 each) that improved the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012947627
We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens' and governments' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reacted strongly to the crisis: they report engaging...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012835113
Empirically observed intertemporal choices about money have long been thought to exhibit present bias, i.e. higher short-term compared to long-term discount rates. Recently, this view has been called into question on both empirical and theoretical grounds, and a spate of recent findings suggest...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012952508