Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
The reasons why people give to charities vary from individual to individual, but it is clear that large, public gifts to a charity from well-known donors increase the number and size of smaller individual gifts. In this working paper, Dean Karlan and John A. List show that the effect has to do with overcoming the asymmetry of knowledge about the quality of the charity.
Lant Pritchett and Amanda Beatty argue that many education systems are attempting to push children through curricular material faster than their teachers can teach it and their students can learn it. Students fall behind and eventually stop learning. The authors provide a formal model of this phenomenon and provide empirical evidence on its implications.
This paper examines opportunities for improved efficiency in malaria control, analyzing the effectiveness of interventions and current trends in spending. Overall, it appears that resources for malaria control are well spent—however, there remain areas for improved efficiency, including (i) improving procurement procedures for bed nets, (ii) developing efficient ways to replace bed nets as they wear out, (iii) reducing overlap of spraying and bed net programs, (iv) expanding the use of rapid diagnostics, and (v) scaling up intermittent presumptive treatment for pregnant women and infants.
The authors find that the value of discovered reserves is high relative to the costs of exploration and that many countries can continue to generate resource rents far longer than indicated by current reserve estimates. In some cases, public measures to encourage private exploration may be justified.
This paper identifies the factors at both the country and the bank levels that contributed to the behavior of real credit growth in Latin America during the global financial crisis.
Jacob Hughes, Amanda Glassman, and Walter Gwenigale discuss the design, opportunities, and limitations of the of Liberia Health Sector Pool Fund.
The authors apply Birdsall and Kharas’s Quality of Official Development Assistance (QuODA) methodology to rank donors across 23 indicators of aid effectiveness in health.
In this working paper, the authors investigate the relation between class (measured by the position in the income distribution), values, and political orientations using comparable values surveys for six Latin American countries.
In this working paper, the authors find that remittances are often greatly underestimated in surveys. They suggest ways to improve the collection of such data.
In this working paper, Laura E. Seay traces the development of section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, examines the effects of the legislation, and recommends new courses of action to move forward.
This report summarizes recent trends in large-scale tropical forest clearing identified by FORMA (Forest Monitoring for Action). FORMA produces indicators that track monthly changes in the number of 1-sq.-km. tropical forest parcels that have experienced clearing with high probability. This report and the accompanying spreadsheet databases provide monthly estimates for 27 countries, 280 primary administrative units, and 2,907 secondary administrative units.
This paper develops and illustrates a prototype incentive system for promoting rapid reduction of forest clearing in tropical countries.
To enhance efficiency of public spending in oil-rich economies, this paper proposes that some of the oil revenues be transferred directly to citizens, and then taxed to finance public expenditures. The argument is that spending that is financed by taxation—rather than by resource revenues accruing directly to the government—is more likely to be scrutinized by citizens and hence subject to greater efficiency.
David Wheeler and co-authors use detailed monthly data from FORMA (Forest Monitoring for Action) to determine the factors that contribute to deforestation in Indonesia. Their results highlight the importance of incorporating economic dynamics into financial compensation arrangements for forest conservation while casting doubt on the efficacy of tradition protection arrangements.
Using data from Kenya—a poor country with weak public institutions—the authors find a large effect of private schooling on test scores, equivalent to one full standard deviation.
This paper reflects on the global goal setting experience of the MDGs and what might be done differently if there is new round of MDGs after 2015.
Until recently, the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been an effective framework for cooperation because it has continually adapted to changing economic realities. The current Doha Agenda is an aberration because it does not reflect one of the biggest shifts in the international economic and trading system: the rise of China.
In developing countries where elections are costly and accountability mechanisms weak, politicians often turn to illicit means of financing campaigns. This paper examines one such channel of illicit campaign finance: India’s real estate sector. Politicians and builders allegedly engage in a quid proquo, whereby the former park their illicit assets with the latter, and the latter rely on the former for favorable dispensation. At election time, however, builders need to re-route funds to politicians as a form of indirect election finance. One observable implication is that the demand for cement, the indispensible raw material used in the sector, should contract during elections since builders need to inject funds into campaigns. Using a novel monthly-level data set, we demonstrate that cement consumption does exhibit a political business cycle consistent with our hypothesis. Additional tests provide confidence in the robustness and interpretation of our findings.
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