Rachael Meager
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I am an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science with research interests in development economics and econometrics. I do applied Bayesian modelling of treatment effect heterogeneity at multiple levels within data sets and literatures, with the goal of measuring generalisability and quantifying uncertainty around our knowledge base in development economics and economics more broadly.
My papers are below.
My CV is here (but less frequently updated than this website).
Economics Publications, Accepted Papers and Pre-Registrations
"Understanding the Average Impact of Microcredit Expansions: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis of Seven Randomized Experiments" The American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019. Dylan Matthews at Vox.com wrote a great summary of this paper here. (Voxdev piece I wrote explaining this article for a general audience can be found here) (Older version here)
"What are the Effects of Improving Management Practices on Exporting among SMEs in Middle-Income Countries*? A Comparison of Bayesian and Frequentist Impact Evaluation Approaches" with David McKenzie, Leonardo Iacovone, and Darío Rodríguez Pérez Accepted at the Journal of Development Economics based on the pre-registration report https://www.bitss.org/publishing/rr-jde-about/prospective-articles/ ; eventual publication venue TBD
"Competing Lending Platforms, Endogenous Reputation, and Fragility in Microcredit Markets" with Peter Bardsley, The European Economic Review, 2019 (Older version here)
CS/ML Conference Publications
"Fast robustness quantification with variational Bayes" with Ryan Giordano, Tamara Broderick, Jonathan Huggins and Michael Jordan, 2016 ICML Workshop on #Data4Good: Machine Learning in Social Good Applications, New York, NY
Working Papers
"Aggregating Distributional Treatment Effects: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis of the Microcredit Literature" (Revise and Resubmit at the AER)
Online Appendix for Aggregating Distributional Treatment EffectsVitamin A Supplements and Child Mortality: Resolving a Controversy in Meta-analysis (Paper completed but embargoed, draft available by email)
Selected Work In Progress
"Automatic Finite-Sample Robustness Techniques" with Ryan Giordano and Tamara Broderick
"A Multifaceted Approach to Poverty Alleviation in Six Countries: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis of the Graduation Program" with Andrew Gelman, Dean Karlan, Chris Udry and Witold Wiecek
"Combining Experimental and Observational Studies in Meta-Analysis: Leveraging Experimental Structures to Eliminate Selection Bias" with Michael Gechter
"Data Transforms Are Models" with Edward Jee
Some Public Goods
My slides on public speaking for academic economists (especially for grad students)
My advice on how to get into a top econ phd program if you did your undergrad in Australia (I wrote this just after I got into MIT. Remarkably it seems to hold up.)