Publications

A temporary-worker program that allows Filipinos to work in South Korea sets up unusually good circumstances for measuring the effects of migration. Michael Clemens and Erwin Tiongson take advantage the natural experiment to find that affected households spend more, borrow less, and invest more in their human capital.

Here we extend the basic idea of rigorous impact evaluation—the use of a valid counterfactual to make judgments about causality—to emphasize that the techniques of impact evaluation can be directly useful to implementing organizations (as opposed to impact evaluation being seen by implementing organizations as only an external threat to their funding).

Despite the increased use of conditional and unconditional cash-transfer programs worldwide, a majority of social protection programs in both developed and developing countries use in-kind transfers and vouchers. This paper reports the results of a randomized evaluation of an unconditional cash transfer and voucher program in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country that has been plagued by intense civil war for much of the past two decades.

A number of Andean countries stand out in their successful use of macroprudential financial regulations. This paper focuses on three: countercyclical capital requirements, countercyclical loan-loss provisioning requirements, and liquidity requirements.

This paper updates Working Paper 294. Forest Conservation Performance Rating (fCPR) is a system of color-coded ratings for tropical forest conservation performance that can be implemented for local areas, countries, regions, and the entire pan-tropics.

Francis Fukuyama lays the conceptual groundwork for a new way to identify the components of governance and more usefully measure their quality.

How do entrepreneurs learn whether they have what it takes to manage larger businesses? It's likely through experimentation. In this paper, Dean Karlan, Ryan Knight, and Christopher Udry develop a model to help understand the impediments to experimentation and the benefits to giving it a try.

This paper details that results of an experiment in northern Ghana in which small-scale farmers were randomly given different kinds of potentially risk-reducing assistance.