Video

Sylvie Lambert (Paris School of Economics), Garance Genicot (Georgetown University), and Markus Goldstein (World Bank) discuss the significance of ensuring land rights to economic activity in the agricultural sectory in the Congo Basin, how securing land rights for women is…

Economic Development & Institutions programme is developing a diagnostic framework that will help identify the institutional challenges a country faces in boosting development and economic outcomes, and as such highlights where efforts should be spent to enhance development activities. Francois…

Despite the prevalence of “criminal governance” in cities around the world, there is very little information available to policymakers about effective strategies to reduce the influence of urban armed groups. Santiago Tobon, (Innovations for Poverty Action and Universidad EAFIT, Columbia),…

How can artificial intelligence help understand the decisions of judges to improve the quality of judiciary systems? Francois Bourguignon (Paris School of Economics, Research Director EDI) and Bilal Siddiqi (University of California, Berkeley) explain how randomised control trials can be…

Judicial independence from state bureaucracies is considered critical for the stability of institutions and for ensuring the rule of law. As such, judicial independence is crucially important for understanding the development process. In this video Dr Sultan Mehmood (University of…

Zaki Wahhaj (Member, Advisory Group – Family Gender Conflict), Francois Bourguignon (Paris School of Economics, Research Director EDI), and Kate Vyborny (Duke University) discuss the unintended effects of new laws on the legal age of marriage in rural Bangladesh, and…

The design of development policies requires a precise understanding of the informal institutions regulating economic activities. A key – yet understudied – institution in many low- and middle-income countries is the clan. Catherine Guirkinger (University of Namur) discusses the economic…

More than a billion people currently live without access to electricity in their homes. As policymakers push for increased electricity access, Susanna Berkouwer (University of California, Berkley) examines the work EDI is doing to answer the key question: how can…

The Economic Development & Institutions (EDI) research programme aims to provide evidence and insights into what practical actions can be undertaken to produce institutional changes that will improve a country’s economic development and growth. The importance of a country’s institutions…

Between 3 and 4 June 2019, the Economic Development & Institutions programme hosted its annual general conference. The event, held in Paris, brought together nearly 50 EDI researchers, members of the scientific committees, independent advisory committee and programme management staff….

Professor Christopher Woodruff from the Oxford University explains how EDI research into the constraints of labour courts in Mexico City helped to improve the effectiveness of the judiciary system, and influence the biggest labour law reform in Mexico in a…

Federico Finan, Associate Professor of Economics and Business at UC-Berkeley, introduces the EDI convening conference titled, “Sharing Strategies, Sharing Solutions: A Policy Institute for Innovations in Public Services.” The main goals of the event are to identify ways in which…

Charity Moore from the Harvard Kennedy School presents research from a project on “USing digital trails to improve management and accountability for public service delivery in India.” Service delivery in development settings in hierarchical in nature, which can lead to…

Kate Casey of Stanford University presents research to date from the project on “Politician entry, selection and performance in Sierra Leone.” How do political parties choose candidates who run in the general elections Political party have regional geographic strongholds, which…

Andrew Zeitlin from Georgetown University presents his research on the compositional consequences of performance pay in the education sector in Rwanda. H notes that in developing country education there is tremendous variation in teacher quality and internationally, these differences have…

Gianmarco León on pay-for-performance (P4P), which has been shown to be effective in job performance in both private and public organizations. The research examines how incentives affect performance when they are implemented across multiple layers of an organization – from…

Edward Miguel of the University of California at Berkeley presents research on “The political economy and governance of rural electrification in Kenya.” In the last few years it has become a major policy and foreign aid priority to enhance the…

Michael O’ Sullivan from the World Bank presents research on “Relaxing credit constraints and tenure insecurity in imperfect markets.” The project motivation arises from recognition that in the absence of well-functioning markets for land, credit and insurance, farming households are…

Kate Vyborny presents her research on a project that explores how women in Pakistan can get access to the rights that they legally have. She looks particularly at the legal rights that are understood and established around marriage contracts. This…

Eric Arias from William & Mary College presents research from his field experiment in Colombia on community policing and public trust. Arias begins with the motivation for this research, which is centred on the premise that citizens’ trust and cooperation…

Virginia Nelder, from the Kenya Law Reform Commission, presents her research on “Access to justice in Kenya’s magistrates’ courts: Judicial systems as public goods.” The project she presents aims to provide the research necessary to make evidence-based policy and legislative…

Bilal Siddiqi from the World Bank presents his research on “Using administrative data systems to improve court efficiency (India, Kenya, Tanzania)”. Questions reviewed through this research include: How do disputes get reported? How is the quality of adjudication affected by…

Joyce Sadka from the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM) presents her research on “Improving the Effectiveness of Labor Courts through Information and Conciliation” undertaken together with the courts in Mexico City. Sadka asks can informing plaintiffs and defendants about…

Shekhar Mittal, of the University of California at Berkeley, presents his research on the Value Added Tax (VAT) system in India. A key development concern is how to improve tax collections, which are central to building state capacity. Mittal examines…

Justine Knebelmann from the Paris School of Economics presents her research on a project undertaken in collaboration with the Senegalese tax administration. She reviews the motivations for research on the property tax regime, and examines how technological improvements in the…

Pierre Bachas from the World Bank presents on his EDI-funded research in Senegal on how to audit populations when there is limited government capacity. This presentation was part of a larger convening workshop for EDI, “Sharing Solutions, Sharing Strategies: A…

Ernesto Dal Bó, Professor in Management Philosophy and Values at UC Berkeley, and Benjamin Klooss, EDI Programme Manager at Oxford Policy Management, reflect on the EDI conference “Sharing Strategies, Sharing Solutions: A Policy Institute for Innovations in Public Services.” They…

This video provides an overview of the first year of the programme, where 23 path-findings papers were produced by world class academics that identified the research gaps and set the priorities for the remaining four years of EDI.

Catherine Guirkinger and Jean-Philippe Platteau discuss their findings based on their research on the dynamic aspects of family institutions. Their findings have also been published in the EDI Path-Finding Paper, ‘The Dynamics of Family Systems: lessons from past and present times‘.

This video provides an overview of the importance of linking Randomised Control Trials to create learning opportunities and ensure policy relevance at all levels of the research.  In April 2016 EDI, in partnership with CEGA, organised a matchmaking workshop, which was…

Louis Kasekende (Deputy Governor, Bank of Uganda) discusses the role of formal and informal institutions in the financial sector. He refers to recent EDI path-finding research papers to focus on the transition from informal to formal institutions and its effect…

Joan Esteban (Institute for Economic Analysis) and Debraj Ray (New York University) explain how civil wars are the major impediments to growth, and offer three lessons from existing research. Watch our Spotlight on Conflict and Development below:

Kaivan Munshi (University of Cambridge) explores how labour movements and development are linked, and provides insight into the role of policy around this area. Watch the video below for his overview:

Sam Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute explains how institutions are the rules of the game, that regulate how we interact with each other. “If we don’t understand how institutions work, we can’t possibly understand how economies change,” he says….

A number of EDI colleagues and advisors provide an introductory overview of the Economic Development and Institutions research programme. “If you want to reduce the income gap between the poorest and non-poorest countries in the world, then you have to…