Projects
Recent working papers
Poverty at Higher Frequency (with Joshua Merfeld). National poverty rates are meant to track the share of populations that are poor in a given year. We show that, instead, de facto poverty rates often reflect the fraction of the year that households experience poverty. This transformation arises in low- and middle-income countries that follow expert guidelines for collecting household expenditure data. The de facto measures reflect seasonal variability and register deprivations of households not usually considered poor. With panel data from India we show how, contrary to historical definitions, global poverty depends on households’ abilities to smooth consumption within the year.
Selecting Experimental Sites for External Validity (with Michael Gechter, Keisuke Hirano, Jean Lee, Mahreen Mahmud, Orville Mondal, Saravana Ravindran, and Abu Shonchoy). Policy decisions often depend on evidence generated elsewhere. We take a decision theoretic approach to choosing where to experiment to optimize external validity. We frame external validity through a policy lens, taking a Bayesian approach and developing a prior specification for the joint distribution of site-level treatment effects using a microeconometric structural model and allowing for other sources of heterogeneity. With data from South Asia, we show that, relative to basing policies on experiments in optimal sites, large efficiency losses result from instead using evidence from randomly-selected sites or, conversely, from sites with the largest expected treatment effects.