Studies
Easterly examines the common criticisms of development RCTs: ethical concerns, external validity, theoretical paucity, data mining, and limited applicability to macro problems.
The author examines a natural experiment in India "in which randomly chosen seats in local legislatures are set aside for women for one election at a time...The data suggest that reservations work in part by introducing into politics women who are able to win elections after reservations are withdrawn and by allowing parties to learn that women can win elections."
From the abstract: "Do electoral quotas for women alter women's chances of winning elections after they are withdrawn? I answer this question by examining an unusual natural experiment in India in which randomly chosen seats in local legislatures are set aside for women for one election at a time. "
Easterly advocates a decentralized, democratized, "bottom up" approach to development, where political and social freedoms allow individuals to devise highly local, specific solutions to growth and development. This harks back to Friederich Hayek's advice to encourage liberty first, as prosperity would follow. (Link downloads a PowerPoint file.)
From the abstract: "Many countries have introduced political a?rmative action for women to improve female representation, often with the explicit hope of reducing perceived voters
The paper examines the results of a randomized monitoring experiment conducted on nurses in Udaipur, India. While initially effective, the program was eventually undermined by collusion between the moniters and "monitorees", who forged attendance records.
From the abstract: "The public Indian health care system is plagued by high staff absence, low effort by providers, and limited use by potential beneficiaries who prefer private alternatives. This artice reports the results of an experiment carried out with a district administration and a nongovernmental organization (NGO)." While nurses initially responded to incentives, collusion between nurses and supervisors eventually muted the impacts.
Easterly critiques Paul Collier's interventionist development agenda, labeling it overly neocolonialist and militaristic and based on faulty assumptions and poor statistics.
Collier studies the post-Cold War spread of democratic institutions, and how the relative strength of those institutions engendered more or less corruption and related economic performance.
