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The Negative Consequences of Overambitious Curricula in Developing Countries
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2012)
Learning profiles that track changes in student skills per year of schooling often find shockingly low learning gains. Using data from three recent studies in South Asia and Africa, we show that a majority of students spend ...
Escaping Capability Traps through Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA)
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2012)
Many reform initiatives in developing countries fail to achieve sustained improvements in performance because they are merely isomorphic mimicry—that is, governments and organizations pretend to reform by changing what ...
The Place Premium: Wage Differences for Identical Workers Across the US Border
(2009)
We estimate the “place premium”—the wage gain that accrues to foreign workers who arrive to work in the United States. First, we estimate the predicted, purchasing-power adjusted wages of people inside and outside the ...
Deals Versus Rules: Policy Implementation Uncertainty and Why Firms Hate It
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)
Firms in Africa report "regulatory and economic policy uncertainty" as a top constraint to their growth. We argue that often firms in Africa do not cope with policy rules, rather they face deals; firm-specific policy actions ...
Is India a Flailing State?: Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization
(John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2009)
India is an emerging global superpower as its rapid growth has transformed its economy and has maintained itself as the world’s largest democracy. But at the same time India lags in many dimensions—its malnutrition rate ...
How Business is Done and the 'Doing Business' Indicators: The Investment Climate when Firms have Climate Control
(Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2010-11)
"Doing Business" (DB) provides measures of the time and costs associated with fully complying with an array of business regulations. Enterprise Surveys (ES) ask a wide range of firms about their actual experiences in doing ...
Autonomous Reform versus Global Isomorphism: Explaining Iran’s Success in Reducing Fertility
(Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2017-11)
A long-standing literature in the sociology of organizations (e.g., DiMaggio and Powell 1983) suggests that, as change agents face uncertainty about actions and outcomes, they often seek legitimacy through isomorphism: ...
Doing Problem Driven Work
(Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2015-12)
We often observe that more successful efforts to establish complex state capabilities are problem driven; focused relentlessly on solving a specific, attention-grabbing problem. This is the first principle of Problem Driven ...
Deals Versus Rules: Policy Implementation Uncertainty and Why Firms Hate It
(Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2010-10)
Firms in Africa report "regulatory and economic policy uncertainty" as a top constraint to their growth. We argue that often firms in Africa do not cope with policy rules, rather they face deals; firm-specific policy actions ...
Doing Iterative and Adaptive Work
(Center for International Development at Harvard University, 2016-01)
Many of the challenges in international development are complex in nature. They involve many actors in uncertain contexts and with unclear solutions. Our work has proposed an approach to addressing such challenges, called ...