Bayesian Impact Evaluation with Informative Priors: An Application to a Colombian Management and Export Improvement Program Leonardo Iacovone, David McKenzie and Rachael Meager Abstract Policymakers often test expensive new programs on relatively small samples. Formally incorporating informative Bayesian priors into impact evaluation offers the promise to learn more from these experiments. We evaluate a […]
BREAD Working Paper No. 596, September 2021
Aspirations and Financial Decisions: Experimental Evidence from the Philippines David McKenzie, Aakash Mohpal and Dean Yang Abstract A randomized experiment among poor entrepreneurs tested the impact of exogenously inducing higher financial aspirations. In theory, raising aspirations could have positive effects by inducing higher effort, but could also reduce effort if unmet aspirations lead to frustration. […]
BREAD Working Paper No. 506
Growing Markets through Business Training for Female Entrepreneurs: A Market-Level Randomized Experiment in Kenya David McKenzie, Susana Puerto Abstract A common concern with efforts to directly help some small businesses to grow is that their growth comes at the expense of their unassisted competitors. We test this possibility using a two-stage randomized experiment in Kenya which […]