Economic Development: Taking stock of what we know so far

Pascaline Dupas (Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Stanford University, Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research) gave the Tinbergen Institute Economics lectures 2018.

Pascaline Dupas’ research aims to understand the barriers that households and governments face in accumulating or fostering accumulation of health and education, and how these barriers can be overcome. She conducts extensive fieldwork — field experiments embedded in longitudinal data collection efforts, which are used to perform empirical tests of microeconomic theory and to quantify the effects of potential policies. Health is the primary focus of Dupas’ research to date. Her work covers the role of information and education in health behavior, and the role of subsidies in increasing adoption of health technologies.

Topic

The quality of life in many poor countries has considerably increased in the past 25 years, but gaps with rich countries remain incredibly large. This mini-course will review what we know about the causes of persistent underdevelopment. We will focus on microeconomic issues: we will seek to understand the factors and constraints influencing individual-level, household-level, or firm-level outcomes and decision-making in developing countries. We will discuss the respective roles of geography and institutions in both the short and long run, the types of anti-poverty programs and governance reforms that economic theory predicts could be effective, and which ones have been tried, what impact they have had and why.