Sunday, April 06, 2008

Economics and Development

A biology postgraduate student was asking for some ideas on how academic economics is contributing to the study of development. Not my area but some interesting recent contributions include (others can add stuff also):

Esther Duflo's work is clearly one place to start

http://econ-www.mit.edu/faculty/eduflo/papers

The lab at MIT is linked below

http://www.povertyactionlab.org/

Emily Oster has written on HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her papers are available below,.

http://home.uchicago.edu/~eoster/

A recent paper by Cormac O'Grada in the Journal of Economic Perspectives is well worth reading

http://ideas.repec.org/a/aea/jeclit/v45y2007i1p5-38.html

The Journal of Development Economics is linked below

http://ideas.repec.org/s/eee/deveco.html

Douglas Almond has written several recent papers on the effect of poor early conditions on later outcomes. They are relevant to the domain but also illustrate very well the methodology that economics researchers use to establish causal relationships

http://www.nber.org/~almond/

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation recently established in Washington is also doing a lot of work relevant to development economics

http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/

ok, if you get through all that it will be a good start

2 comments:

Kevin Denny said...

O Grada has a book on famines coming out shortly with Princeton UP.

Gerard O'Neill said...

Some good links Liam. Here's a few more for people doing some of the most interesting 'applied' work in the economics of development space:

William Easterly
http://www.nyu.edu/fas/institute/dri/Easterly/bio.htm

Paul Collier
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~econpco/

Karol Boudreaux
http://www.enterpriseafrica.org/people/id.95/people.asp