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WORKING PAPERS
May 20, 2022
Many public organizations employ technologies of scrutiny such as peer review or quality assurance to improve their performance and decision-making. Such technologies may affect performance and decision-making directly, through scrutiny, and indirectly, through behavioural responses by agents within...
WORKING PAPERS
August 27, 2020
A growing literature measures the impact of education interventions in low- and middle-income countries on both access and learning outcomes. But how should one contextualize the size of impacts? This article provides the distribution of standardized effect sizes on learning and access from 234 stud...
WORKING PAPERS
August 07, 2013
In this paper we examine how policymakers and practitioners should interpret the impact evaluation literature when presented with conflicting experimental and non-experimental estimates of the same intervention across varying contexts. We show three things. First, as is well known, non-experimental ...
WORKING PAPERS
April 14, 2011
This paper analyzes some of the elements that cause the perception in the realm of social policy that too little evidence is produced and used on the impact of specific policies and programs on human development. They propose we develop Results-Based Social Policy Design and Implementation systems t...
WORKING PAPERS
October 08, 2010
The authors examine the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), an experimental and intensive package intervention to spark sustained local economic development in rural Africa, to illustrate the benefits of rigorous impact evaluation. Estimates of the project’s effects depend heavily on the evaluation m...
WORKING PAPERS
January 29, 2007
Microfinance is often viewed as a tool for empowering women. However, it is not clear that increasing a woman's share of household income also improves her status within the household. In this working paper, CGD non-resident fellow Dean Karlan and his co-authors examine whether access to individual...
WORKING PAPERS
January 29, 2007
Can one teach basic entrepreneurship skills? A growing number of microfinance organizations are trying, in the hopes of improving the livelihood of their clients and to further their mission of poverty alleviation. In this working paper, CGD non-resident fellow Dean Karlan and his co-author measur...
WORKING PAPERS
January 29, 2007
Microfinance is generally credited with helping to alleviate poverty and improve the lives of the poor. But as microfinance institutions move beyond entrepreneurial credit to offering consumer loans, many practitioners and policymakers are skeptical about "unproductive" lending. In this working pap...
WORKING PAPERS
January 29, 2007
Policymakers often urge microfinance institutions to increase interest rates to eliminate reliance on subsidies. This makes sense if the poor will borrow regardless of interest rates: then micro lenders increase profitability without reducing the poor's access to credit. But there is little evidenc...