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Introducing the Development Impact blog
Welcome to our new blog about impact evaluation. The number of impact evaluations both within and outside the World Bank have increased dramatically in recent years (see Figure below). The World...
View ArticleWhat can marketing experiments teach us about doing development research?
The March 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review has “a step-by-step guide to smart business experiments” by Eric Anderson and Duncan Simester, two marketing professors who have done a number of...
View ArticleOn experimental evaluations of systems interventions
A quick look at the burgeoning literature on policy evaluations will reveal a preponderance of evaluations of demand side schemes such as conditional cash transfers. There is an obvious reason for this...
View ArticleDean Karlan’s new book: RCTs – this time it’s personal!
More than Good Intentions: How a new economics is helping to solve global poverty is a personalized helicopter tour of many recent randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in developing countries. It is...
View ArticleOn improving power in small sample studies
My last post discussed an example of a system intervention (improvements to the pharmaceutical supply chain) and the not uncommon inferential challenge of low power from relatively few units of...
View ArticleWhat is success, anyhow?
As a fair number of impact evaluations I work on are programs designed by governments or NGOs, I often initially have to have a tricky discussion when it comes time to do the power calculations to...
View ArticleAdvocating a treatment that may not help the treated?
Last month, NIAID released news that treating HIV-infected partners in mostly heterosexual HIV-discordant couples at 13 sites around the world reduced HIV transmissi
View ArticlePoor by (revealed) choice: A neophyte’s guide to Martin Ravallion’s proposal...
(based on discussions with Chico Ferreira, Ambar Narayan, Carolina Sanchez and especially, Aaditya Mattoo) This is part I of a three-part series.
View ArticleKuznets Waves and the Great Epistemological Challenge to Inequality Analysis
A couple weeks ago I was fortunate to serve as a discussant at one (of the many) launch events for Branko Milanovic’s latest book: Global Inequality: A new approach for the age of globalization. The...
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