Pater Familias

Theories, observations, and articles, by Philip Schaefer · All posts · Categories

A SUCCESSFUL ECONOMICS EXPERIMENT IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY.

May 23, 2010 at 8:09 PM · Economics

A SUCCESSFUL ECONOMICS EXPERIMENT IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY. When I studied economics, experiments were rare. Economists took data as they found them. Professors Duflo and Banerjee founded an institute at MIT which done over 200 economics experiments. One experiment dealt with the problem of absentee teachers in some Indian schools. In 60 schools, teachers were given a timestamping camera and asked to take photographs of themselves with their students at the beginning and end of each day. In the control group of 60 schools, there were no cameras—and the teachers were twice as likely to be absent. And the students in the control group schools did not perform as well on tests at the end of the experiment.

Referenced in: “WHAT ECONOMISTS DON’T KNOW AND PERHAPS CAN’T.”