Welcome to my website

Updated: June 25, 2009

Immediately below are my most recent papers and presentations (less than a year old) organized by my major topics of research (labor mobility, education and schooling, economic growth in developing countries, and development practice (the latter covers a wide variety of sub-topics)).

In the menu above under "Research"  are, not surprisingly, my cumulative research papers (again sorted by topic) with a brief description of each paper, sometimes the key graph or table, and an attempt to situate the paper within the broader literature.  Also, since presentations sometimes summarize the content and context of the paper better than the paper itself, I also include the various presentations of the paper. On line access to papers is also easily available by searching on my name (which is conveniently unique) via SSRN or Google Scholar.

Topic: Education and Schooling

The Illusion of Equality: The Educational Consequences of Blinding Weak States. (June 1, 2009). (with Martina Viarengo). Compares the variability of the distribution of school specific learning acheivement across public and private schools to see if public sector control produces more or less uniformity in school quality.

Producing superstars for the economic Mundial: The Mexican Predicament with quality of education. (November 2008). This paper was produced as part of a volume detailing the policy issues facing Mexico. Its main point is to point out a combination of three issues that are rarely discussed, and never all brought together which are (a) the returns to very high quality skills do appear to be rising, particularly in globalized activities (the "superstar" economy), (b) the combination of very low average performance on internationally comparable skills, such as the PISA mathematics scores, with low(ish) variability means that there are very few Mexico high school students in the global top ten percent--amazingly few, perhaps as few as 6,000 a year, and (c) the existing interventions to raise quality, even if implemented and even if effective, are unlikely to make an appreciable difference in the lack of super-stars for the Economic Mundial over the forseeable horizon.

This paper was (briefly) presented at a meeting in Mexico June 22, 2009 sponsored by the World Economic Forum.

Five things Education Policy needs from Comparable, Long-term, Panel Studies. (March 27, 2009). Presentation to the "Young Lives" conference, based on a long-term study being carried out on child poverty in five developing countries.

Long Term Global Challenges in Education: Are There Feasible Steps Today? This is a background paper prepared for a Rand conference on long term planning.

The Rebirth of Mass Education. This is the introduction to a book on schooling, a book that will summarize my views on this broad topic, which is a book that may well never be written, so I figure I will share the introduction, which is written.

Remembering the Forgetting in Schooling: Comments on Two Papers on the History of Education. (September 2008) As this is a comment on other people's work, it is much more interesting that most of what I write. There is no way to describe this paper, it is just fun.

Does Schooling Help Explain Any of the Big Facts About Growth?

(February 2009). This paper was written based on a presentation given to the Growth Commission session on education and growth and is forthcoming in a volume based on those contributions. It is an update and less cover of much of the material in "Does Learning to Add Up Add Up."

The Policy Irrelevance of the Economics of Education: Is "Normative as Positive" Useless--Or Worse? Paper presented at a Brookings conference May 30, 2008 (forthcoming in a Brookings book) arguing that economists do not have a coherent general model of educational policy (in particular for developnig countries) and that without such a model there is not way to claim that this or that research agenda is "policy relevant." I argue that economists reliance on "normative as positive" has perhaps been worse that useless as it has directed the reseach agenda in particularly unproductive ways.

The State, Socialization, and Private Schooling: When Will Governments Support Alternative Producers? This paper continues the examination of the impact of the socialization objectives of basic education on educational policy, in particular focused on which combinations of governmental objectives and governance competence will be compatible will large scale adoption of public support to private (either for-profit or non-profit) schooling.

Topic: Development Practice

Moving out of Poverty: Success from the Bottom Up. (April 27, 2009). This was a joint presentation with Deepa Narayan at the book launch of your new book (of the same title). It has some of the graphs and findings of the book. The book has its own site.

Political Economy of Aid Evaluation: How to Build Sustainable and Effective Movements. (February 2009). This was a presentation given at a conference at NYU hosted by Bill Easterly and Aid Watch calledWhat Would the Poor Say. In the presentation I argue for more evaluation that is actually integrated into program operation, an approach I call MeE--which combines Monitoring, "Big E" evaluation of the rigorous type proposed by places like JPAL and IPA, but also "little e" which is using evaluation to feed back in real time into program implementation. I argue the MeE approach is a realistic approach to organization's efforts to improve their own the ground effectiveness.

Is India a Flailing State? Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization. (December 2008) This is a paper arguing that India, while it is making great strides economically and has maintained a vibrant democracy is "flailing" in that the head no longer effectively controls the limbs of the state(s) and hence its ability to act effectively to deliver services of any kind--from policing to education to social safety nets--is weak and weakening. This was prepared for a publication Rule and Reform in the Giants: India and China Compared.

Book Review of Ed Luce's In Spite of the Gods. This review is slated to appear as a review article in the Journal of Economic Literature.

Topic: Labor Mobility

Immigration is a Development Tool. (May 26th 2009). Presenstation at the conference "Beyond the Fence" jointly sponsored by Center for International Development (CID) and the Center for Global Development (CGD).

Also, see the YouTube teaser for a documentary "The Borders Question".

Is Migration Good for Development? How Could You Even Ask? (April 30th). This is a presentation given at Wellesley College.

The Cliff at the Border (February 2009). This paper was written based on a presentation for a conference about "Globalization and Equity" sponsored as part of the Growth Commission led by Michael Spence. The paper focuses the equity and justice issues around the constraints on labor mobility, in particular the question of why some many other aspects of globalization whose total human well-being consequences are trivial compared to labor mobility get so much more attention.

The Place Premium: Wage Differences for Identical Workers across the US Border. This is a revised version (January 2009) that is now available as both a Center for Global Development and a Kennedy School of Government working paper.

Income per natural:  Measuring development as if people mattered more than places. (with Michael Clemens) This paper estimates instead of the income of people in Jamaica or Albania or Nepal the income per Jamaican or Albanian or Nepali--no matter where they are in the world. We combine data about the pattern of out-migration to OECD countries with an estimate of the income of naturals who are living in those countries. We find that income per natural is often substantially higher than national income per capita. This is another version of the same paper that has been revised for submission to the Population and Development Review that is less technical (details in a technical appendix) and focuses more on the policy implications.

Topic: Economic Growth

Deals versus Rules: Uncertainty in Policy Implementation in Africa. (February 2009) This paper (and presentation) are part of research into the determinants of growth in Africa and was presented at a recent NBER conference, it is very preliminary and a newer better version should be available soon. It emphasizes that in weak environments for policy implementation, particularly for policies that are implementation intensive, like the collection of taxes or regulatory encforcement, the de jure and de facto policies may not even be close relatives. In this case "policy uncertainty" is not inter-temporal uncertainty about changing rules but firm specific uncertainty about actions of the agents of the state in implementation even for constant set of rules.

Reform is Like a Box of Chocolates:An Interpretive Essay on Understanding the Pleasant and Unpleasant Surprises of Policy Reform. This is a unusual entry on the list of "new" papers, as it was finished in its current form in June 2005, but I have kept hoping I would update and improve it before sending it out, but now I think I will not do that in the forseeable future and in its present state it is, in my view, worth reading, and hence I may was well put up. This is related to the paper above, which is more about using the framework for understading the decisions of firms whereas this paper is about the larger issues of understanding the 'big picture' in policy reform.

Implementing Growth Analytics: Motivation, Background, and Implementation. (September 2008). This paper was prepared for a training exercise for DFID and explicates the steps of a growth diagnostic exercise. It should be read in conjunction with Ricardo Hausmann (and co-authors) recent "mindbook" on growth diagnostics. This emphasises that "growth diagnostics" is more than just the empirical exercise of the diagnostics tree of the Hausman, Rodrik, Velasco paper but has preceding steps (identifying the "growth state" and desired transition) and following steps (an "implementation diagnsotic").