Development Economics

The big picture questions that generations of development economists thought about, but lacked the tractable models, the rich microdata and the computing power to test at scale: this course provides an incomplete tour of recent frontier research in development economics. It combines reduced-form causal evidence with structural models and estimation to address 'old school' big picture questions of economic growth and development. 

READING SUGGESTIONS 

Day 1: Economic Growth and Structural Transformation

• Part 1.1: Economic growth (Lewis, 1954; Solow, 1956; Lucas, 1988; Caselli, 2005)

• Part 1.2: Structural transformation (Caselli & Coleman II, 2001; Herrendorf et al., 2014)

• Part 1.3: Productivity gaps (Restuccia et al., 2008; Young, 2013; Gollin et al., 2014; Hamory et al., 2021; Dinkelman & Ngai, 2022; Ngai et al., 2022)

Day 2: Poverty Traps and Policy Scale-Up

• Part 2.1: Poverty traps and non-convexities (Bandiera et al., 2017; Balboni, Bandiera et al., 2021; Banerjee et al., 2021).

• Part 2.2: Scaling up treatments (Bryan et al., 2014; Bergquist et al., 2022; Bassi et al., 2021; Egger et al., forthcoming).

Day 3: Infrastructure and Spatial Development

• Part 3.1: Market access and spatial integration (Atkin & Donaldson, 2015; Donaldson & Hornbeck, 2016; Brooks & Donovan, 2020).

• Part 3.2: Public infrastructure (Duflo, 2001; Duflo & Pande, 2007; Faber, 2014; Donaldson, 2018; Asher & Novosad, 2019; Ashraf et al., 2021).

• Part 3.3: Migration frictions (Bryan et al., 2014; Bryan & Morten, 2019; Morten, 2019; Lagakos et al., 2018; Lagakos et al., 2020).

• Part 3.4: Spatial general equilibrium (Gollin et al., 2017; Moneke, 2020).

Day 4: Energy Access and Electrification Puzzle

• Part 4.1: Energy and economic growth (Lipscomb et al., 2013; Fried & Lagakos, 2017; Ratledge et al., 2021).

• Part 4.2: Causal evidence on electrification (Dinkelman, 2011; Lee et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2016; Burlig & Preonas, 2016; Kassem, 2018; Burgess et al., 2020; Allcott et al., 2016).

• Part 4.3: Heterogeneous effects of electrification (Moneke, 2020; Kassem et al., 2022; Figueiredo Walter & Moneke, 2022).

Day 5: Climate Change, Environment and Development

• Part 5.1: Climate change in low income countries (Burgess et al., 2017; Kocornik-Mina et al., 2020; Balboni, 2019; Somanathan et al., 2021; Deschenes, 2022; Nath, 2022).

• Part 5.2: Deforestation (Burgess et al., 2012; Hansen et al., 2013; Souza-Rodrigues, 2019; Balboni, Burgess et al., 2021; Harstad, 2022).

• Part 5.3: Biodiversity, ecosystem services and pollution externalities (Jayachandran et al., 2017; Lipscomb & Mobarak, 2017).