Examples from development economics for your introduction to econometrics course

It’s been a hectic 2025 at VoxDev. In the first half of this year, we have featured a wide range of cutting-edge research which showcases the ways in which economists have applied econometric methods to policy-relevant questions.

This post highlights how different econometric methods have been applied in development economics to yield important policy insights, mainly focusing on articles published during 2025. Sprinkling these into your reading lists and courses can help students see how the methods they are learning can be applied in interesting and useful ways in the real world. You can find previous versions of this blog with further examples here:

• How are econometric methods applied by researchers in development economics?
• VoxDev as an educational resource.

If you have a general interest in development economics, study economics, or teach a development economics course, our newsletter is the best way to keep up to date – you can sign up here and join our growing mailing list of almost 7,000 development economists, practitioners and students.

RCTs in development economics

Randomised Control Trials remain the most common method used in the research we feature. Here are some examples of the results from RCTs in development economics:

• Subsidising secondary education led to large multi-generational impacts in Ghana, especially among female recipients - Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, Michael Kremer, Elizabeth Spelke and Mark Walsh.
• Providing clean water via decentralised treatment and home delivery led to high take-up and substantial health benefits for rural households in India - Fiona Burlig, Amir Jina and Anant Sudarshan.
• A large-scale housing lottery programme demonstrates unmet demand for improved housing among slum dwellers in Ethiopia - Simon Franklin.
• Community information on the willingness-to-pay for property titles helped improve state capacity in Tanzania - Tanner Regan and Martina Manara.
• Allowing students to take textbooks home led to large educational gains in the Democratic Republic of Congo - Jean-Benoît Falisse, Marieke Huysentruyt and Anders Olofsgård.
• Bundling health insurance with microcredit reduced out-of-pocket health expenses by 50% among informal workers in Burkina Faso, without decreasing microcredit uptake - Delphine Boutin and Laurène Petitfour.
• Third-party certification and warranties increased rural households’ willingness to pay for high-quality solar lamps by 12-14% in Senegal - Aidan Coville, Joshua Graff Zivin, Arndt Reichert and Ann-Kristin Reitmann.
• Increasing government transparency in cities across China helped bridge the gap between environmental law and practice - Mengdi Liu, Mark Buntaine, Sarah Anderson and Bing Zhang.
• Providing farmers with access to peer discussion groups increased agricultural technology adoption in Tanzania - Violet Lasdun, Aurélie Harou, Christopher Magomba and Davíd Guereña.

More examples of randomised control trials.

Natural experiments in development economics

There are many contexts where an RCT is not feasible, so researchers often look for 'natural experiments':

• The sudden rollback of Mexico’s landmark conditional cash transfer programme, Prospera (formerly Progresa), allowed Fernanda Marquez-Padilla, Susan Parker, and Tom Vogl to evaluate its impact on education and labour outcomes, offering lessons for policy entrenchment worldwide.
• The introduction of genetically engineered soy in Brazil enabled Vivek Moorthy to identify the effect of agricultural technology on female labour market outcomes.
• The 2002-3 El Nino climate pattern caused heavy rainfall and flooding in Ecuador. Maria Bas used this climate shock to study the impact on firms’ production and price decisions.
• Between 1969 and 1984, the Kampung Improvement Program (KIP) provided basic public goods and verbal non-eviction guarantee to slum dwellers in Jakarta, Indonesia. Mariaflavia Harari and Maisy Wong use this slum upgrading policy to study the impact of delayed formalisation today.

More examples of natural experiments.

Differences-in-differences in development economics have been used to show:

• Coordinated health aid for vaccination increased child coverage rates, saving approximately 1.5 million lives: Kartini Shastry and Daniel Tortorice.
• High-speed rail connectivity led to a one-third increase in electric vehicle sales in China: Hanming Fang, Ming Li, Long Wang, and Zoe Yang.
• Providing bicycles to girls reduced the gender gap in secondary education in India: Vagisha Pandey, Sahil Pawar, and Nishith Prakash.
• The construction of sex-specific toilets in schools reduced cases of sexual violence in India: Pei Gao, Aditi Kothari, and Yu-Hsiang Lei.
• Universal secondary education contributed to women’s empowerment in Uganda: Douglas Kazibwe and Jinhu Li.
• Living near Special Economic Zones in Africa made households better off in terms of wealth, utilities, and education: Matthew Amalitinga Abagna, Cecília Hornok, and Alina Mulyukova.
• A mass vaccination campaign in Burkina Faso transformed survival, schooling, and livelihoods for a generation: Richard Daramola, Md Shahadath Hossain, Harounan Kazianga, Karim Nchare.
• Carefully designed outsourcing regulation improved wages without reducing employment in Mexico: Alejandro Estefan, Roberto Gerhard, Joseph Kaboski, Illenin Kondo, and Wei Qian.
• A surge in beef exports to China triggered widespread growth in Uruguay’s service sector: Francesco Amodio, Giorgio Chiovelli, and Serafín Frache.

More examples of difference in difference models.

Regression Discontinuity Designs (RDDs) in development economics

RDD's have been applied to various questions on VoxDev:

• Meera Mahadevan uses the winning margin of votes in an election to identify illicit subsidies to constituents of the ruling party, which led to staggering efficiency losses in India’s electricity sector.
• Jules Gazeaud and Claire Richard use a municipality-level poverty cutoff to study the impact of conditional cash transfers on educational outcomes in Morocco.
• Samuel Berlinski and Jessica Gagete-Miranda exploit the fact that Brazilian disability employment quotas only applied to companies with over 100 workers to assess the effects of stricter enforcement of labour law.

More examples of regression discontinuity designs.

Instrumental Variables (IVs) in development economics

Some interesting recent examples of the instruments used by economists:

• Lightning strikes as an instrument for digital infrastructure to examine the impact of 3G broadband internet access on COVID-19 prevalence in Indonesia: Johannes Kunz, Carol Propper, and Trong-Anh Trinh.
• Mass media exposure as an instrument for family-planning messaging to evaluate the effect of contraception on child malnutrition in India: Mehreen Mookerjee, Manini Ojha, and Sanket Roy.

More examples of the instrumental variables.

Calibrated models

An increasing body of research in development economics uses calibrated models:

• Bruno Conte quantified how climate change will impact migration in sub-Saharan Africa using spatial data on migration flows and prices.
• Farid Farrokhi and Heitor S. Pellegrina studied the role of trade in agricultural modernisation in Latin America.
• Shilpa Aggarwal, Brian Giera, Dahyeon Jeong, Jonathan Robinson, and Alan Spearot assessed how reducing travel costs increased fertiliser adoption in remote villages in Northern Tanzania.
• Julian Arteaga, Nicolas de Roux, Margarita Gafaro, and Heitor Pellegrina found that weather shocks induced fragmentation in farm size distribution in Colombia.

More examples of model calibration in economics.

Heterogeneity in development economics

Aggregate effects can mark important differences in impacts for different groups:

• Jason Kerwin finds that providing information on actual HIV transmission rates—which are often lower than the perceived risk—helped curb risky sexual behaviour in Malawi. This negative treatment effect, however, was concentrated among the top decile of baseline risk beliefs (i.e. those who believed HIV infection was inevitable)—whose risk-taking behaviour dropped by 49%.
• Kevin Grieco, Abou Bakarr Kamara, Niccolò Meriggi, Julian Michel, and Wilson Prichard find that the introduction of ‘digital town halls’—WhatsApp forums where citizens could discuss local issues—had no effect on tax compliance in Freetown, Sierra Leone. While supporters of the government became increasingly tax compliant, this effect was cancelled out by opponents whose compliance fell following the intervention.
• Xianling Long and Zhiqiang Wang find that climate change is driving firms in China to innovate. These effects are largest for specific types of firms, including private firms, those in the agriculture and health sectors, and those located in areas with greater awareness of climate change.
• Tommaso Sonno finds that multinational enterprises are contributing the conflict in Africa, with the strongest effects observed in industries where land resources are heavily utilised such as agriculture and forestry.

More examples of heterogeneity.

Other development economics resources for teachers

Alongside our articles, VoxDev has over 300 podcast episodes where researchers discuss findings from their research. Why not mix up your reading list with the inclusion of some of these episodes of VoxDevTalks?

Also, our growing library of VoxDevLits summarises the body of evidence on specific development topics. These are kept up to date, freely available, and focus on policy implications and accessibility. These living literature reviews also outline lots of ideas for where future research is needed – a potential starting point for ambitious and important dissertation projects.

Here are some other great resources for those seeking a deeper understanding of the methods we have mentioned above:

• There are few better places than the Development Impact World Bank Blog. Florence Kondylis and David McKenzie have just updated their “One-Stop Shop for Methodology” which is a curated list of their methodology explainers.
• I would highly recommend this series of blogs – Impact in Global Development: A Discussion Series – on the Global Development & Economic Advancement Substack by David Nash.
• For those at the more advanced end of university development economics, the BREAD-IGC PhD style online courses are another brilliant resource.
• Another useful set of podcasts outside of our own is the “Trade Talks Episode Catalog for Educators” which divides their podcasts by topic and is a super useful resource.
• Finally, for video, econimate summarises research papers in an animated, accessible style.

Editor’s note: If you think there is anything we should add to this post, or have any comments/suggestions, please email [email protected]. This blog will be a continually updated resource, like our VoxDevLits, and evolve over time as we feature new research using economic methods of the future. Also, if you are involved in teaching development and have used VoxDev as an educational resource, it is always great to hear about this – tracking this type of “impact” is always tricky and your stories help us understand our reach.