Randomized Controlled Trials in Environment and Development Economics Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs), also known as Randomized Evaluations, have gained increasing prominence as a methodology for evaluating policy impacts. In RCTs, researchers randomly assign study participants to one or more groups: the "treatment group," which receives the intervention, and the "control group", which doesn't. Researchers measure the outcome variables of interest in these groups to identify the impact of the treatment as the single mean difference between the treatment and control groups. RCTs also empower researchers and policymakers to tailor their research designs to address specific inquiries about program effectiveness and its [...]

Gender Norms, Women’s Executive Function, and Anti-Poverty Programs: Experimental Evidence from India Sociocultural norms and executive function are powerful factors in an individual’s agency, decision-making, and development. Gender norms, for example, mediate the relationship between economic development and women’s labor market outcomes. Executive functions make it possible for a person to live, work, and learn. They are important for taking simple to complex actions, from cooking, shopping, nurturing children, planning, and to execution. Low executive functions can frustrate the success of anti-poverty and empowerment programs through participants’ inadequate planning, improper utilization of resources, and the lack of timely actions. In developing [...]

Welfare Sensitivity and Positional Preferences in a Developing Country It is well-established in the empirical literature that people care about relative-status or positionality, hence any policy that makes someone better off imposes negative externality on his/her peers. However, the effectiveness of public policy aimed at mitigating positional externality hinges on the measurement of relative concerns, which is individual and context specific requiring empirical data. This study investigates positional concerns among over-exploited natural resource dependent communities with defined gender roles in a developing country, and the specific role of welfare sensitivity in moderating relative concerns. We found that compared to the women, [...]