Content Type
Full Article: “Putting a Band-Aid on a Corpse: Incentives for Nurses in the Indian Public Health Care System”
In this randomized controlled trial, Banerjee, Duflo, and Glennerster attempted to improve attendance in the health care industry by introducing financial incentives. The results started out positive, but the system was eventually thwarted on the ground.
Read MoreFull Article: “Incentives Work: Getting Teachers to Come to School”
Esther Duflo, Hanna Rema and Ryan Stephen tried to incentivize teachers to go to class by making the children take a picture with the teacher at the beginning and the end of the day, and found that the intervention had made a difference.
Read MoreFull Article: “Missing in Action: Teacher and Health Worker Absence in Developing Countries”
This article investigates absenteeism among teachers and healthcare workers in many developing countries, and finds it to be a considerable problem.
Read MoreFull Article: “The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development.”
This article by Michael Kremer from 1993 draws a parallel from the spaceship Challenger, which exploded due to the malfunctioning of a single piece, to economic development.
Read MoreFull Article: “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990”
An earlier paper from Michael Kremer, this paper considers the two main arguments on the nature of population: that more people means more stomachs and thus more pressure, or that more people means more brains and thus more innovation.
Read MoreFull Article: “Patent Buyouts: A Mechanism for Encouraging Innovation”
In this article, 2019 Nobel laureate Michael Kremer looks back to history for an example of a patent buyout: a situation in which the government buys the patent for a technology which would be beneficial to the public, and then places it in the public domain.
Read MoreFull Article: “Worms at Work: Long-Run Impacts of a Child Health investment”
In this study, Michael Kremer and crew assess the impacts of childhood de-worming interventions in Kenya on how those same children perform in the labor market once they’ve grown up, and find some surprisingly persistent effects on their welfare.
Read MoreFull Article: “Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities”
This paper on the effects of deworming treatments on children in Kenya, by Michael Kremer and Edward Miguel, was one of the pioneers in the use of randomized controlled trials at a scale of interest and with implications for cash-strapped governments.
Read MoreBlog: Three Problems with Randomized Controlled Trials
This blog post on Brookings from Jeffrey Hammer covers three big reasons not to think of randomized controlled trials as the next “magic bullet” for development.
Read MoreVoxDev Executive Summary: 2009 VAT Reform in China and Lumpy Investment
This executive summary discusses the VAT reform in China that took place in 2009 and how that has affected investment.
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