SPEAKERS

Jean-Michel Debrat, Deputy General Director, AFD, France

 

Arianna Legovini, Head, Development Impact Evaluation Initiative, World Bank

Arianna Legovini is the Head of the Development Impact Evaluation Initiative at the World Bank and is responsible for developing a new approach to use rigorous impact evaluation to improve the Bank’s operations and help governments test implementation alternatives and scale up the ones that prove more effective. Arianna also establishe d and leads the Africa Impact Evaluation Initiative for the Africa region of the World Bank. In this role, she helps coordinate about 230 ongoing impact evaluations in education, health, governance, agriculture and infrastructure. Previously, she was acting chief of the Poverty Unit in the Inter-American Development Bank, coordinator of the Network of Inequality and Poverty of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA), and an economist in the finance and infrastructure and the public sector groups in the Latin American region of the World Bank. She has twenty academic publications including journal articles and chapters in edited volumes.

 

MICROFINANCE

(note: all paper titles are links)

The Impacts of Microfinance

Abhijit Banerjee and Fouad Abdelmoumni

 

Much hope has been placed in the ability of microfinance to transform the lives of the poor, leading to large investments in microfinance programs.  A series of randomized evaluations are underway in several different countries around the world.  Some initial results from an evaluation in Hyderabad, India provide evidence on whether microfinance will provide the credit that households need to create and expand businesses, and whether it leads improvements in education, health, or women’s decision making.

 

Banerjee, Abhijit, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster and Cynthia Kinnan, “The miracle of microfinance? Evidence from a randomized evaluation”

 

Abhijit Banerjee, Professor of Economics, MIT, USA

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003 he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan and remains one of the directors of the lab. He is a past president of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the NBER, a CEPR research fellow, an International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. His areas of research are development economics and economic theory. He has authored two books as well as a large number of articles and is the editor of a third book. He finished his first documentary film, "The name of the disease," in 2006.

 

Fouad Abdelmoumni, Managing Director, Al Amana, Morocco

Fouad Abdelmoumni is General Manager of Al Amana, a microcredit association with an active portfolio of 500,000 active clients worth € 220 million and with 2,000 employees. He has been in this position since the inception of the association in 1996.  His other positions include: member of the CGAP Executive Committee; former member of WWB's board; former member of the UN Advisors Group for the Year of Microcredit; and former chairman of the board of Sanabel, a network of MFIs in the Arabic countries (2003 – 2005).  Mr. Abdelmoumni graduated in economics from University Mohammed V in 1987, and pursued the Higher Curriculum of Management at ISCAE (Institut Supérieur de Commerce et d’Administration des Entreprises) between 1995 and 1997. He is also very active in national and international civil society, and assumed diverse leadership positions on the boards of : AMDH (Moroccan Human Rights Association), Espace Associatif (NGO for the advancement of civil society and democracy since 1996),  TrustAfrica (“a Foundation for peace, economic prosperity, and social justice”),  IHRIP (International Human Rights Internship Program, part of the Institute of International Education, Washington DC),  ICHRP (International Council on Human Rights Policy, Geneva).

Sensitivity to Interest Rate for Entrepreneurs: South Africa, Mexico, Philippines, and Peru

Dean Karlan and Carlos Danel

 

Policymakers often prescribe that microfinance institutions increase interest rates to eliminate their reliance on subsidies. This strategy makes sense if the poor are rate insensitive: then microlenders increase profitability (or achieve sustainability) without reducing the poor’s access to credit. We test the assumption of price inelastic demand using randomized trials.

 

Paper to be provided.

 

Dean Karlan, Professor of Economics, Yale, USA

Dean Karlan is a Professor of Economics at Yale University. Karlan is also President of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), co-director of the Financial Access Initiative, a research fellow at J-PAL, and co-Founder and President of StickK.com. Karlan received a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T., an M.B.A. and an M.P.P. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in International Affairs from the University of Virginia.

 

Carlos Danel, co-Founder and co-CEO, Compartamos, Mexico

Carlos Danel is Co-Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of CompartamosBanco, one of the largest microfinance institutions in Latin America, serving more than 1,000,000 low-income microentrepreneurs (mostly women). He has been a speaker in conferences and seminars and has been nominated a Young Global Leader by the Forum of Young Global Leaders at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. He holds a degree in Architecture from the Universidad Iberoamericana and an MBA from the Instituto Panamericano de Alta Dirección de Empresa in Mexico City.

GOVERNANCE

 

Power to the People: Community Monitoring of Health Centers in Uganda

Jakob Svensson and Mary C.K. Bitekerezo

 

This randomized field experiment estimated the impact of community-based monitoring of public primary health care providers in Uganda. A local NGO encouraged communities to be more involved with the state of health service provision and strengthened their capacity to hold their local health providers to account for performance. A year after the intervention, treatment communities were more involved in monitoring the provider, the health workers appeared to exert higher effort to serve the community, and there were large increases in utilization and improved health outcomes.

 

Martina Björkman and Jakob Svensson, “Power to the People: Evidence from a randomized field experiment on community-based monitoring in Uganda”

 

Jakob Svensson, Professor of Economics, Stockholm University, Sweden

Jakob Svensson is a Professor of Economics at the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES), Stockholm University. Before joining IIES, he was a senior economist at the Research Department, World Bank. His research interests include corruption, accountability in service delivery programs, and political economy. He is an associate editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association and Economica.

 

Mary C.K. Bitekerezo, Senior Social Development Specialist, World Bank, Uganda
Mary C. K. Bitekerezo is a Senior Social Development Specialist at the World Bank, resident in Uganda. She has worked on social issues including social accountability across sectors, in various Anglophone countries in Africa at the World Bank for 13 years. Prior to that Mary was a lecturer at Makerere University, Kyambogo Campus, Uganda, and a Program Manager with various International NGOs.  Among others she has written a Policy Note on Social Accountability for Uganda (2008) and initiated Participatory Poverty Assessments in Uganda (1998 and 2001). Mary holds a Bachelor of Science from Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda; a Masters in Educational Administration and Management from Brandon University, Manitoba,
Canada; and other professional diplomas and certificates in Curriculum Development and Participatory Methodologies. She is a life member of the International Development Evaluation Association (IDEAS).

Voters' Campaign

Rohini Pande and Anjali Bhardwaj

 

With young democracies facing challenges across the developing world, efforts are underway to mobilize voters. But does voting behavior based on identity (ethnicity, caste or gender) outweigh voting based on issues and performance in poor communities? Can voter mobilization or education campaigns lead to more accountable government? In a randomized experiment, we provided citizens in urban slums with information on performance of the incumbent and qualifications of candidates. We find significant voter responsiveness to these campaigns, as measured by higher turnout, lower vote share for candidates with a criminal record and higher vote share for incumbents who performed well.

 

Paper to be provided.

 

Rohini Pande, Professor of Economics, Harvard, USA

Rohini Pande is the Mohammed Kamal Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Pande is an NBER Research Associate and serves on the board of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) and the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economic Profession (CSWEP). Her research focuses on the economic analysis of the politics and consequences of different forms of redistribution, principally in developing countries.  Prior to joining the Kennedy School, she was an Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University. She has taught at Yale University, MIT, and Columbia. A Rhodes Scholar, she is the recipient of several NSF and other research grants. She holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics, an M.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford, and a B.A. in Economics from St. Stephens College, Delhi University.

 

Anjali Bhardwaj, Founding Member and Director, Satark Nagrik Sangathan, India

Anjali Bhardwaj is the Director of Satark Nagrik Sangathan (SNS).  She has been closely associated with the Right to Information movement in India since 2000 and has been a member of the Working Committee of the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information. Before setting up Satark Nagrik Sangathan, she worked for several years on development issues at various organizations including the World Bank. She studied for an MSc degree in Environmental Management at Oxford University and did her MA in economics from the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University.

Improving Police Effectiveness in Rajasthan

Esther Duflo and Nina Singh

 

Good governance is widely recognized as an important precondition for economic development. Usually, maintaining law and order and a stable society is the domain of the police. In order for police to function effectively as agents of society, mutual trust and understanding is essential. A randomized evaluation measured the impact of four separate training and management interventions in the police force in Rajasthan.  This evaluation found that increasing the duration of police posting improves relations with the public; communications and public relations training increases crime victims’ satisfaction with investigations; investigation training improves the quality of investigations; freezing transfers and providing time off increase worker satisfaction; and rotation of duties increases officers’ skills.

 

Abhijit Banerjee, Raghabendra Chattopadhyay, Esther Duflo and Daniel Keniston, “Rajasthan Police Performance and Perception Intervention”

 

Esther Duflo, Professor of Economics, MIT, USA

Esther Duflo is a Professor of Economics at MIT and a founding member of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a research network specializing in randomized evaluations of social programs. She completed her undergraduate studies at l’Ecole Normale Superieure, received a master’s degree from DELTA in Paris, and completed a Ph.D. in Economics at MIT. Her research focuses on household behaviour, education, policy evaluation, and microfinance. Professor Duflo has received numerous academic honors and prizes including the Elaine Bennett Prize for Research (2003), le Cercle des Economistes (Le Monde, 2005), Médaille de Bronze (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Département de Sciences de l’homme et de la société, 2005), le Prix Luc Durand-Reville (Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 2008), and the Calvó Armengol International Prize (Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, the Government of Andorra, and the Credit Andorrà Bank Foundation, 2009). 

 

Nina Singh, Inspector General of Police, Rajasthan, India

Nina Singh is an officer of Indian Police Service (IPS), the premier, top level police service of the country. She has the distinction of being the first woman IPS officer working in the state of Rajasthan. She has worked in various challenging assignments across the state and acquired in-depth knowledge of police administration, crime investigation and maintenance of law & order. She was handpicked for the important job of Member-Secretary of Rajasthan State Commission for Women, an autonomous and quasi judicial institution that acts as a watch dog to protect the rights and interests of women. In her present assignment as Inspector General of Police (Planning and Welfare) at the State Police Headquarters, she is leading the reform and modernization processes in the 70,000 plus strong force. She is a Mason Fellow, an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and received her Master of Arts from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has been decorated with the prestigious Indian Police Medal for Meritorious Services by H E the President of India. She received the Indira Gandhi Priyadarshini Award in the year 2000 for outstanding contribution to the society and was honored with Nari Shakti Samman (2001) for being a symbol of womanpower. 

 

CONDITIONAL CASH TRANSFERS

 

Familias en Accion : A Conditional Cash Transfer Program in Colombia

Orazio Attanasio and Bertha Briceño

 

The presentation will discuss the evaluation of Familias en Accion, a large Conditional Cash Transfer program in Colombia. The first part will tell the story behind the evaluation: how the evaluation methodology was bargained over and eventually agreed upon between the Government and the evaluators with the mediation of the World Bank and the IADB, which financed the intervention and its evaluation with a loan to the Colombian government. The second part will provide the results of the evaluation for some important outcomes: consumption, school enrollment, height and weight per age, attendance to growth and development checkups for children, and occurrence of some diseases. The third part will describe how these results affected the expansion of the program by the government and how the results were interpreted.

 

Paper to be provided.

 

Orazio Attanasio, Professor of Economics, University College London, UK

Orazio Attanasio is a Professor of Economics at UCL and a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He is the graduate tutor and chair of the graduate committee. He is director of the Centre for the Evaluation of DEvelopment POlicies (EDEPO) at UCL and IFS. A graduate of the University of Bologna and the London School of Economics, Orazio Attanasio was an Assistant Professor in Economics at Stanford University and a National Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford, until 1994. From 1993 to 1995, he was an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Bologna when he was appointed Professor of Economics at University College London and Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He has been visiting professor at the University of Chicago and visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund. From 1998 to 2002, he was Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of the European Economic Association and the Journal for Money Credit and Banking, and he is on the Editorial Board of the Review of Economic Studies. In 2000 he was elected Member of the Council of the European Economic Association, in December 2001 Fellow of the Econometric Society and in 2002 Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, USA. Since 1992 he has been running, with Chris Carroll and Victor Rios-Rull, the workshop on Aggregate Implications of Microeconomic Consumption Behaviour at the Summer Institute of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

 

Bertha Briceño, Head of Directorate for Evaluation of Public Policies, National Planning Department, Colombia

Bertha Briceño, from October 2006 to present, is head of the Directorate for Evaluation of Public Policies of the National Planning Department of Colombia, which is in charge of commissioning the impact evaluations of major governmental programs. The Directorate has managed the evaluations of the Familias en Accion Conditional Cash Transfer program, the Jovenes en Accion youth training program, the ongoing evaluations of the Hogares Comunitarios nursery program, and the Laboratorios de Paz sustainable development program, among many others. Prior to joining the Planning Department, she worked at the Office of Evaluation of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for three years, participating in the country program evaluations of Ecuador and El Salvador, and conducting the impact evaluation of a water sanitary expansion program of Quito and the IDB´s theme evaluation of technology development funds and R&D funds, among others. She has also worked for the Central Bank of Colombia. Ms. Briceño holds a Master´s degree in Public Administration in International Development from Harvard University and a Bachelor´s degree in Industrial Engineering from Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia.

LABOR MARKET

 

Public and Privately-Provided Counseling and Long-Term Unemployment: Lessons from a Randomized Experiment

Bruno Crépon and Annie Gauvin

 

Chronic, long-term unemployment is a considerable problem in France.  One randomized evaluation measured the impact of two separate programs to help unemployed workers find employment.  The first, Cap Vers l’Enterprise (CVE) was provided directly by the government, the other, Opérateurs Privés de Placement (OPP), was supplied by private firms.  Overall, preliminary results suggest the CVE had a large impact (taking into account that there is still a large margin of uncertainty): At six months, the assistance and support increased workers chances of finding employment by 20 to 30%.

 

Luc Behaghel, Bruno Crépon, Julien Guitard et Marc Gurgand, “Evaluation d’impact de l’accompagnement des demandeurs d’employ par les Opérateurs Privés de Placement et la programme Cap Vers l’Entreprise (Rapport Intermédiare)” 

 

Bruno Crépon, Director of Research Services, CREST-INSEE, France

Bruno Crepon is a researcher at CREST and Professor of Econometrics at ENSAE and Ecole Polytechnique. His research focuses mainly on labor market policies, training program and micro-credit in developed countries. He his currently conducting randomized evaluations in France of counselling schemes focused on the unemployed and welfare recipients. His is also conducting field experiments in Morocco on microcredit and entrepreneurship.

 

Annie Gauvin, Director of Research, Pôle Emploi, France

Annie Gauvin is the Director of Research, Evaluation, and International Affairs at the French Employment Agency (Pôle Emploi).

She coordinates studies and evaluations of the agency’s work and oversees the international activities of the Pôle Emploi, including the European network of SPE chiefs and support of WAPES (the World Association of Public Employment Services).  Ms. Gauvin was trained in economics and demographics at the University of Paris I.  She was an Associate Professor of Economics at University of Paris I from 1978 until joining the research group at the Ministry of Labor and Employment in 1992.  From 1992 to 1998, she worked at the General Planning Commission, in charge of labor and labor policy, and from 1998 to 2004, she served as Head of the Research Department at the General Delegation for Employment and Professional Training, where she was in charge of multi-sector and international surveillance, evaluation and research expertise and interfacing, and advice on labor policy, in addition to the European Strategy for Employment in France, and the Employment Commission, and worked with international organizations such as the OECD, ILO, and G8.  She has served as Director of Research at Pôle Emploi since 2005.

 

HEALTH AND EDUCATION

 

Every Child in School and Learning Well

Rachel Glennerster and Rukmini Banerji

 

Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as a key to improving their quality. We conducted a randomized evaluation of three interventions to encourage beneficiaries’ participation in schools in India: providing information on existing institutions, training community members in a testing tool for children, and training volunteers to hold remedial reading camps. These interventions had no impact on community involvement, teacher effort or learning outcomes inside the school. However, in the third intervention, youth volunteered to teach camps, and children who attended substantially improved their reading skills. This suggests that citizens face constraints in influencing public services.

 

Abhijit V. Banerjee, Rukmini Banerji, Esther Duflo, Rachel Glennerster and Stuti Khemani, “Pitfalls of Participatory Programs: Evidence from a randomized education initiative in India”

 

Rachel Glennerster, Executive Director, J-PAL, MIT, USA

Rachel Glennerster is Executive Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT. Her research includes randomized evaluations of health and education in India, girls’ empowerment in Bangladesh, and community driven development in Sierra Leone. She oversees J-PAL’s work to translate research findings into policy action and helped establish Deworm the World of which she is a board member. She sits on the UK government’s Department for International Development’s Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact. She has a PhD in economics from Birkbeck College, University of London, and is coauthor of “Strong Medicine: Creating Incentives for Pharmaceutical Research on Neglected Diseases”.

 

Rukmini Banerji, Director, Programs and Senior Member of National Leadership Team, Pratham, India

Rukmini Banerji is a member of the national leadership team of Pratham, a large scale citizens’ initiative to universalize elementary education in India (www.pratham.org). Currently Pratham’s flagship program Read India has a presence in over 200 rural districts and has reached close to 20 million children.  Initially trained as an economist in India, Ms. Banerji was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and completed her PhD at the University of Chicago.  She did her post-doctoral work at the Population Research Centre at the University of Chicago and later worked as a program officer at the Spencer Foundation before returning to India in 1996.  Currently Ms. Banerji is responsible for Pratham’s work in several major states in north India. She is also a lead member of the team that conducts ASER (Annual Status of Education Report).  ASER is the largest annual study ever done by Indian citizens to monitor the status of elementary education in the country. In 2008 through this citizens’ effort, over 700,000 children were reached in 564 out of 575 of India’s rural districts. (The ASER reports are available at www.asercentre.org). In the four years since it was initiated, the ASER effort has been widely recognized for its innovative use of citizens’ participation in understanding and improving the delivery of basic services. 

 

Strategies for Scaling-up ITN Coverage in Sub-Saharan Africa

Pascaline Dupas and Liza Kimbo

 

Sleeping under a treated bednet is an effective way to prevent malaria, but it is often argued that cost-sharing—charging a subsidized, positive price—for a health product is necessary to avoid wasting resources on those who will not use or do not need the product. Will charging a fee for these bednets reduce illness more than handing them out for free? Does handing them out for free dampen people's willingness to pay a fee in the future? This presentation provides evidence on these questions from two randomized controlled trials conducted in Kenya

 

Pascaline Dupas, “What matters (and what does not) in households' decision to invest in malaria prevention?”

 

Jessica Cohen and Pascaline Dupas, “Free Distribution or Cost-Sharing? Evidence from a Randomized Malaria Prevention Experiment”

 

Pascaline Dupas, Professor of Economics, UCLA, USA

Pascaline Dupas is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at UCLA. Dupas’ areas of research are applied microeconomics and development economics. She is currently conducting field experiments in health, education, and microfinance in Kenya, Ghana, and Morocco.

 

Liza Kimbo, Director, CFWshops Kenya

Liza Kimbo is the current Regional Director for the East and Central Africa Region with Academy for Educational Development (AED).  She holds a Masters in Public Health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a Masters in Business Administration from the United States International University and a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Connecticut.  Prior to joining AED, Liza established a health franchise organisation with over 63 clinics called CFWshops in Kenya.

Les interventions ont lieu soit en Français, soit en Anglais. Une traduction simultanée est disponible dans l'amphithéâtre.  À partir du 17 juin, l'intégralité des conférences sera accessible en vidéo, dans les deux langues sur www.college-de-france.fr.

The presentations will be made either in French or English. Simultaneous translation will be available in the main lecture hall. After June 17, all of the sessions will be available in video in both languages at www.college-de-france.fr.