Is Populism Necessarily Bad Economics?
I distinguish between political and economic populism. Both are averse to agencies of restraint, or, equivalently, delegation to technocrats or external rules.
Research
Household Debt
ne reason the Great Recession was, alas, great was the quantity of household debt accumulated in the lead-up to the financial crisis.
Monetary Regimes to Cope with Volatile Commodity Export Prices: Two Proposals
What monetary regime should commodity-exporting developing countries adopt?
How to Cope with Volatile Commodity Export Prices: Three Proposals
Countries that specialize in commodities have in recent years been hit by high volatility in world prices for their exports.
Alleviating Global Poverty: Labor Mobility, Direct Assistance, and Economic Growth
Decades of programmatic experimentation by development NGOs combined with the latest empirical techniques for estimating program impact have shown that a well-designed, well-implemented, multi-faceted
What Do Trade Agreements Really Do?
As trade agreements have evolved and gone beyond import tariffs and quotas into regulatory rules and harmonization, they have become more difficult to fit into received economic theory.
Tangible Information and Citizen Empowerment: Identification Cards and Food Subsidy Programs in Indonesia
Redistribution programs in developing countries often “leak” because local officials do not implement programs as the central government intends. We study one approach to reducing leakage.
Enhancing Public Health Outcomes in Developing Countries: From Good Policies and Best Practices to Better Implementation
In rich and poor countries alike, a core challenge is building the state’s capability for policy implementation.
How to Convene an International Health or Development Commission: Ten Key Steps
The Commission on Investing in Health (CIH), an international group of 25 economists and global health experts, published its Global Health 2035 report in The Lancet in December 2013.
Estimating the Impact of Women’s Education on Fertility, Child Mortality, and Empowerment When Schooling Ain’t Learning
We use literacy data available in the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) for 129 survey rounds, across 54 countries, to estimate the impact of female basic education–which we define as completing si
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