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STICERD brings together world-class academics to put economics and related disciplines at the forefront of research and policy.

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Image: the facade and main door of an old house; Source: Photo by Yasin Hoşgör on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/MUjep_e-YuY
The limits of microfinancing

Microfinance has helped millions of the world's poor build better lives. But can it help the world's poorest people, who spend most of their lives growing food to feed their families, to diversify into other jobs? Jack Thiemel tells Tim Phillips about the impact of one of these projects (with Oriana Bandiera, Robin Burgess, Erika Deserranno, Ricardo Morel, Imran Rasul, and Munshi Sulaiman), and what it tells us about the best ways to help the ultra-poor.Read more...
Image: Plant Growing In Savings Coins; Source: Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash, https://unsplash.com/photos/joqWSI9u_XM
The hidden costs of incentivising later retirement

Over the past two decades, many countries have reformed their public pension systems in pursuit of desirable fiscal effects, often by introducing or strengthening incentives for later retirement. Using Swedish administrative data, Jonas Kolsrud, Camille Landais, Daniel Reck, and Johannes Spinnewijn uncover significant redistributive costs of pension reforms that incentivise later retirement.Read more...
Pillars of Prosperity
Pillars of Prosperity

Using the tools of modern political economics and combining economic theory with a bird's-eye view of the data (now updated for 2021), Timothy Besley and Torsten Persson reinterpret Adam Smith's pillars of prosperity to explain the existence of development clusters--places that tend to combine effective state institutions, the absence of political violence, and high per-capita incomes. Read more...

Latest

Development Discussion Paper
The demand side of Africa's demographic transition: desired fertility, wealth, and jobs

Céline Zipfel

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounts for around 40% of projected global births over the next 80 years. To investigate the roots of persistently high fertility rates across the region, I assemble micro data from 192 Demogr...Read more...

1 December 2022

Econometrics Paper
Regression discontinuity design with potentially many covariates

Yoichi Arai, Taisuke Otsu and Myung Hwan Seo

This paper studies the case of possibly high-dimensional covariates in the regression discontinuity design (RDD) analysis. In particular, we propose estimation and inference methods for the RDD models with covariate sele...Read more...

31 October 2022

Econometrics Paper
GLS under monotone heteroskedasticity

Yoichi Arai, Taisuke Otsu and Mengshan Xu

The generalized least square (GLS) is one of the most basic tools in regression analyses. A major issue in implementing the GLS is estimation of the conditional variance function of the error term, which typically requir...Read more...

27 October 2022

Econometrics Paper
Conditional likelihood ratio test with many weak instruments

Sreevidya Ayyar, Yukitoshi Matsushita and Taisuke Otsu

This paper extends validity of the conditional likelihood ratio (CLR) test developed by Moreira (2003) to instrumental variable regression models with unknown error variance and many weak instruments. In this setting, we...Read more...

11 October 2022

CASEreport
Rough Sleeping in Newham: Policy into practice 2019-2022

Bert Provan

The London Borough of Newham had one of the worst records for rough sleeping in 2018, and lacked an up to date Homelessness and Rough Sleeping Strategy. Compiled over four years of engagement with the borough, this repor...Read more...

20 September 2022

SPDO Research Note
Who is at risk of experiencing violence and has it changed overtime?

Kerris Cooper and Polina Obolenskaya

Published crime statistics show that following a long-term decline in violent crime there has been a flattening out in recent years and certain types of violent crime have increased. This research note examines who is mo...Read more...

15 September 2022

SPDO Knowledge Exchange Brief
Layers of engagement: learning from the Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes research programme public engagement exercise

Tania Burchardt, Bert Provan and Kerris Cooper

The purpose of this note is to share with the research community the lessons we feel we have learned from a public engagement exercise that we undertook, in collaboration with Sense about Science, as part of the Social P...Read more...

24 August 2022

Social Policies and Distributional Outcomes Research Paper
The Conservative Governments’ Record on Employment: Policies, Spending and Outcomes, May 2015 to pre-COVID 2020

Abigail McKnight and Kerris Cooper

In this paper we evaluate the distributional impact of employment policy in the period since the Conservative Government took office in 2015 up until the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. We do this by followin...Read more...

27 July 2022

Econometrics Paper
Isotonic propensity score matching

Taisuke Otsu and Mengshan Xu

We propose a one-to-many matching estimator of the average treatment effect based on propensity scores estimated by isotonic regression. The method relies on the monotonicity assumption on the propensity score function, ...Read more...

19 July 2022

CASEpaper
Living arrangements, intra-household inequality and children’s deprivation: Evidence from EU-SILC

Eleni Karagiannaki and Tania Burchardt

Evidence from the 2014 EU-SILC indicates that a non-negligible proportion of children in Europe live in multi-family households. Leaving aside more complex household types, around 4% of children live with their grandpare...Read more...

22 June 2022