Reshaping Institutions: Evidence on Aid Impacts Using a Pre-Analysis Plan

By Katherine Casey, R. Glennerster, Edward Miguel. 2012

518 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study, entitled Reshaping institutions : evidence on aid impacts using a pre analysis plan, conducted between 2005 and 2009 in Sierra Leone. The study observed the impact of pre analysis plan (PAP) on local institutions by imposing participation requirements for marginalized groups (including women) and test for learning-by-doing effects in Sierra Leone on the individual and village level. Requiring women and young adults to take on leadership positions participate in project meetings, and sign off on project finances does not have any persistent effect on their participation in local decision making or attitudes regarding leadership ability. The project successfully established village organizations and tools to manage the project. The distributions of the project's benefits were equitable and leakage was minimal. There was a significant positive impact on the stock and quality of local public infrastructure. However, there are no detectible changes in the ability to raise funds for local public goods, decision-making process, or social norms and attitudes. Funding for the study derived from the GoBifo Project, the Institutional Reform and Capacity Building Project (IRCBP), The World Bank Development Impact Evaluation (DIME), the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the International Growth Center, 3ie, and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) African Successes Project.

Subfields: Development, Political Science and International Relations, Safety Research

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Citations in the corpus

The Econometrics of Randomized Experiments (2016, background): “, Wu and Hamada (2009), Cox and Reid (2000), Altman (1991), Cook and DeMets (2008), Kempthorne (1952, 1955), Cochran and Cox (1957), Davies (1954), and Hinkelman and Kempthorne (2005, 2008).”
Does Elite Capture Matter? Local Elites and Targeted Welfare Programs in Indonesia (2019, unknown): “…households – or family members of those named households – were also in our random sample of survey respondents (without necessarily knowing whether they were or were not 2 See Casey, Glennerster, and Miguel (2012) for a description.”
Impact of Village Savings and Loan Associations: Evidence from a cluster randomized trial (2016, background): “19 Although this is not equivalent to having laid out a pre-analysis plan as suggested by Casey et al. (2012), we follow this strategy to effectively tie the analysis – and our hands – to these outcome measures.”
Publication bias in the social sciences: Unlocking the file drawer (2014, background): “two-stage review (the first stage for the design and the second for the results), pre-analysis plans (41), and requirements to pre-register studies (16) should be complemented by incentives to not bury insignificant results in file drawers.”
Multiple hypothesis testing in experimental economics (2019, background): “John A. List Department of Economics University of Chicago”
Effects of Payment for Environmental Services (PES) on Deforestation and Poverty in Low and Middle Income Countries: A Systematic Review (2014, background): “Researchers should consider the recent work in development economics for guidance on executing field experiments that might provide more credible evidence (Banerjee and Duflo, 2011; Casey et al., 2012; Karlan and Appel, 2012).”
Do Online Advertisements Increase Political Candidates’ Name Recognition or Favorability? Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments (2014, background): “16 Best practices in randomized trials include the pre-registration of an analysis plan to limit researcher discretion (Casey et al. 2012).”
Field experiments across the social sciences (2017, background): “…in the context of community-drivendevelopment/reconstruction interventions either does not lead to short-term improvements in local governance and collective capacity (Casey et al. 2012, Avdeenko & Gilligan 2015), or leads to improvement only under specific conditions (Fearon et al. 2015).”
The Participation Dividend of Taxation: How Citizens in Congo Engage More with the State When it Tries to Tax Them* (2020, result): “This approach is similar to that of Olken (2007), Casey, Glennerster, and Miguel (2012), and Paler (2013).”