Pamplona. February 25th, 2013.
Eoin McGuirk is a Ph.D. candidate from Trinity College Dublin. While at the NCID, he discussed the causes of teachers’ absenteeism. According to McGuirk, one potential explanation for this phenomenon is the impact of ethnic divisions. By using a nationally representative series of random, unannounced school visits in Uganda; and a large opinion survey of citizens in 16 sub-Saharan African countries, he was able to present robust evidence of a link between ethnic divisions and teacher absenteeism. McGuirk concluded that this study has a sig...
Pamplona. February 11th, 2013.
Erlend Berg is a PhD candidate from the University of Oxford. During his visit to Pamplona, Berg explained the interaction of incentive pay and social distance in the propagation of information about public health insurance programs. By developing a field experiment across 151 villages in South India, Berg concludes that incentive pay improves knowledge transmission to households that are socially distant from the agent, but not to households similar to the agent.
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Pamplona. January 25th, 2013.
Abdulaziz Shiffa is a PhD candidate from Stockholm University. He proposed an explanation on why emerging economies experience a very rapid growth. To respond to this question, Shiffa developed a simple model of growth and economic catch-up that allows for human capital to transfer from frontier to developing economies. By analyzing the results of the model, Shiffa concluded that the possibility of human capital transfer could double the impact of a total factor productivity (TFP) increase in a typical catching-up economy.
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