Recent literature contains many stories of how foreign aid affects economic growth. All the stories hinge on the statistical significance in cross-country regressions of a quadratic term involving aid. Among the stories are that aid raises growth (on average) 1) in countries where economic...

Clemens, Radelet, Bhavnani, and Bazzi (CRBB) argue that the most-cited cross-country studies of the impact of foreign aid can be reconciled if changed in certain ways. The shared finding is then, in the CRBB view, that more aid is followed on average by more growth. I exactly replicate the...

We replicate and reanalyse the most influential study of microcredit impacts (M. M. Pitt & S. R. Khandker's, 'The impact of group-based credit on poor households in Bangladesh: Does the gender of participants matter?', published in the Journal of Political Economy, 106, 1998). That study was...

In recent years, the interdisciplinary nature of global health has blurred the lines between medicine and social science. As medical journals publish non-experimental research articles on social policies or macro-level interventions, controversies have arisen when social scientists have...

Roodman (Stata Journal, 2011) introduced the program cmp for using maximum likelihood to fit multiequation combinations of Gaussian-based models such as tobit, probit, ordered probit, multinomial probit, interval censoring, and continuous linear. This presentation describes substantial...

xtabond2 may hold the record among user-written Stata modules for the most confused users (and perhaps the most-confused too). In this presentation, I motivate and describe, in pedagogic fashion, the Arellano-Bond and Blundell-Bond linear GMM dynamic panel estimators, drawing lessons from a...

The most-noted studies on the impact of microcredit on households are based on a survey fielded in Bangladesh in the 1990s. Contradictions among them have produced lasting controversy and confusion. Pitt and Khandker (PK, 1998) apply a quasi-experimental design to 1991–92 data; they conclude...

The difference and system generalized method-of-moments estimators, developed by Holtz-Eakin, Newey, and Rosen (1988, Econometrica 56: 1371-1395); Arellano and Bond (1991, Review of Economic Studies 58: 277-297); Arellano and Bover (1995, Journal of Econometrics 68: 29-51); and Blundell and Bond...