January 2019: New publications and updates on EDI research
Publications are now beginning to emerge from EDI research, providing deeper insights and analysis into institutions and development.
We provide a summary of these latest updates below:
Randomised Control Trial: “Improving Labor Courts: The Effect of Publicly Provided Lawyers and Information’ in Mexico”
- David Kaplan and Joyce Sadka publish a blog on Animal Politico, entitled: “La reforma de justicia laboral más profunda en más de un siglo” (in English: “The deepest labor justice reform in more than a century”), in which they argue for labor court reform in the face of rigorous evidence of the existence of employer protection contracts and poor performance of individual labor lawsuits.
- A Working Paper has been published by the National Bureau of Economic Research on “Information and Bargaining through Agents: Experimental Evidence from Mexico’s Labor Courts”. The paper provides initial data and analysis to illustrate possible causes of malfunction in Mexico’s labor courts. The paper authors are Joyce Sadka, Enrique Seira, Christopher Woodruff.
Randomised Control Trial: “Who is bogus? Catching fraudulent firms in Delhi”
- Shekhar Mittal, Ofir Reich and Aprajit Mahajan presented some initial findings from their research at the 2018 ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (COMPASS). Their paper, “Who’s Bogus? Learning to Identify Fraudulent Firms from Unbalanced and One-side Labelled Tax Returns Data,” applies machine learning algorithms to systematically and identify fraudulent firms in an economy with weak compliance.
Randomised Control Trial: “Recruitment, effort and retention effects of performance contracts for civil servants”
- A policy brief by Andrew Zeitlin and Jonathan Bower was published by the International Growth Centre on “Improving teacher management and professional development“. The brief highlights three policy ideas with the possibility to deliver large gains relative to their costs to improve the management and professional development of teachers in Rwanda.
Randomised Control Trial: “Institutional reform and de facto women’s rights”
- Pakistan Today reported on proposed changes to marriage documents, in which the language of the contract will also be changed to make the rights of women clear. The legal proposals directly relate to the research undertaken in this EDI project.
Randomised Control Trial: “The Political Economy and Governance of Rural Electrification”
The Economist magazine cited on 7 February 2019 early evidence related to Catherine Wolfram et al’s research on rural electrification. The article is entitled: “Electricity does not change poor lives as much as was thought”.
