CSAE RESEARCH PODCASTS

Can we measure whether countries are on track to halve poverty incidence between 2015 and 2030? This research proposes a framework for modelling projections of multidimensional poverty.

11 February 2025

Researchers discuss using field experiments with ongoing cases to analyse sources of dysfunction in Mexico's largest labour court.

30 January 2025

Can student progression test scores improve as a result of a custom-designed school leadership training programme? This episode discusses a custom-made training program for school leaders in Malawi's primary schools.

03 January 2025

What is the role of international trade in economic development? Researchers study the propagation of trade shocks through production networks and, using a rich micro-level dataset from Turkey, document strong assortative matching of skills in the firms' production networks.

06 November 2024

Researchers discuss the business and price effects of a cash transfer programme delivered to 400,000 refugees in Kenya each month in the form of digital money for buying food at licensed shops.

27 September 2024

Researchers examine how an established social assistance system – not originally designed to support informal workers – can be re-purposed to provide emergency relief to support workers and their household in South Africa.

12 September 2024

How large economic stimuli generate individual and aggregate responses is a central question in economics but has not been studied experimentally. Working with the NGO GiveDirectly, this project examined the impact of a one-time cash transfers of about USD 1000 to over 10,500 poor households across 653 randomised villages in rural Kenya, on the individual households but also the community at large. The research paper produced from this project was published in Econometrica and won the Frisch Medal Award 2024.

28 August 2024

How can different kinds of policy help refugees and other displaced populations find work? What are the benefits of running an adaptive targeted field experiment in the context of jobseekers in developing countries? This project focuses on the impact of three interventions designed to improve formal employment outcomes for Syrian refugees and for local jobseekers in Jordan.

23 February 2024

In April 2020, 1 in 5 South Africans were going to bed hungry. The country had locked down hard, millions of casual workers were laid off. The existing system of food parcel distribution was overwhelmed, and there were issues with logistical management and theft. Kate Orkin influenced £4.87 billion in spending that helped 28.5 million people and saved 5.5 million from extreme poverty. Kate talks to CSAE Director Stefan Dercon about this work.

28 November 2023

Online job adverts show that the demand for AI related skills has grown rapidly in countries around the world since 2015. This project examines the demand for AI skills in India's service sector, using a new dataset of online job adverts.

31 August 2023

Billions of dollars are spent annually on humanitarian support to households in crisis. Researchers discuss a large-scale evaluation that tests the impact of anticipatory cash transfers in response to floods in Bangladesh. Humanitarian workers carry out incredible lifesaving work every day on the front line of crisis response to assist those in the greatest need. Yet repeatedly, despite the fact that billions of dollars are spent annually on humanitarian support to households in crisis, there is very limited evidence on the impact of this support.

03 June 2023

Following on from Youth Impact's work on distance education during the Covid-19 pandemic in Botswana, researchers ask would this approach scale to new settings, with government, and other education in emergencies? Focusing on a method called ‘Connected', a phone call tutorial programme used to deliver high quality education through mobile phone calls, this project replicated and scaled the work from Botswana in five randomised controlled trials in India, Nepal, Kenya, the Philippines, and Uganda.

12 May 2023

There are different lenses and tools we could use to understand and address major societal problems such as poverty, social exclusion, child abuse, discrimination. The focus of this discussion are psychologically "wise" interventions, which address how people make sense of themselves, others and social situations through a social-psychological approach.

20 May 2022

How do we change a corrupt norm? This project looks to address this question through a policy intervention, working with the Ghana Police Service, to try to change the behaviour of the traffic police through an innovative ethics training programme.

03 March 2022

Can Africa learn from the Chinese urbanisation project? In the next 30 years, African cities need to make room for roughly 500 million more citizens, roughly tripling the current urban population. This project seeks to understand how the successes and limitations of China's experience could inform urbanisation challenges currently being faced in Africa and how to design policies that harness the full economic potentials of cities.

24 January 2022

A discussion about some of the first experimental evidence on distance education during the covid-19 pandemic in Botswana.The conversation goes under the hood of the RCTs to discuss some critical implementation lessons and research insights that don't always make it into the final academic paper, and what is next on the horizon.

16 December 2021

Standard microcredit contracts seem to have modest if any effects on the performance of small firms and no effects on household consumption. Could we construct a better design product to improve on the standard contract?

23 November 2021