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Home > Research > Core Research Teams > Microeconomic Studies: Survey and Experimental Methods
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Microeconomic Studies: Survey and Experimental Methods
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In the past two decades a lot of public resources supported by donor funds have been committed to social sector
programs in Pakistan but the condition of the poor has not improved with poverty levels stagnating and human development indicators lagging other developing countries with similar levels of income. The group proposes to use experimental
data to study patterns of behavior and evaluate the impact of policy
interventions on both social and economic outcomes. New developments in field
based experimental research have generated promising ideas for evaluating policy
interventions with the help of randomized trials before they are scaled up to the
national level. The Poverty Action Lab at MIT has popularized this approach to field
based testing of policies as the estimates obtained from such randomizations are
free from biases recurrent in retrospective observational studies.
The team proposes to use this approach in designing and evaluating interventions
in public service delivery in Pakistan, especially in the education sector, and
the results from these experiments will be used to inform education policy at the
national level. The research project will help post graduate students at LSE to
better understand the challenges of field based research and use the data collected
for these interventions to empirically test hypotheses for their M.Phil/PhD dissertations.
The long term goal of the project will be to establish collaboration with Poverty
Action Lab at MIT and engage with leading researchers in the field to carry out
impact assessments of microfinance and health policy initiatives. The team aims
to cultivate and develop a network of researchers at the Collective for Social Science
Research, Mahbub-ul-Haq Human Development Center (MHHDC), Punjab Economic Research
Institute (PERI), Social Policy Development Centre (SPDC) and Sustainable Development
Institute (SDPI) to carry out nation-wide field based testing of interventions in
public-service delivery.
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Lahore School of Economics |