Seed Research Library

SEDRI offers to build Stanford's capacity to do cutting -edge economic policy research in the developing world. We propose to establish a long-term data collection and research presence in a number of developing countries. The research program centers on building a high-quality panel dataset to explore central issues in development, including: (1) human capital accumulation; (2) product and service provision; (3) diffusion of innovations; (4) governance; and (5) entrepreneurship. Building fieldwork research capacity at Stanford will not only allow senior faculty to do cutting - edge research in these domains, it will also provide, through its standing field operations, sustained training opportunities for students, post- docs, and early-career scholars. Altogether, such a campus-wide research collaboration will align the academic pursuits of Stanford scholars with contemporary trends in both policy and academia and so maintain Stanford's leadership in international development.

Relatively expensive innovative technologies have a particular barrier to adoption and diffusion: individuals need credible information about the performance of technology before taking the risk of purchasing it. In resource-constrained environments, this information will generally come from experimentation with the technology by an individual's friends or neighbors or an influential individual in her community. Given this public good aspect of experimentation, standard economic theory predicts that it will be underprovided. The standard approach to overcome this is to subsidize experimentation for a few individuals in each community. Our research tests a number of market-based mechanisms for identifying the optimal experimenters for an innovative production technology – optimal in terms of ultimate diffusion of the technology and ultimate impacts of the experimentation subsidy on output growth for firms (in our specific context, farms) in the community. 

New developments in sensing technologies are creating many cheap, unconventional data streams that should contain information relevant to poverty and hunger. Unfortunately, such data are also extremely unstructured and noisy, largely preventing their use in mapping and modeling human livelihoods. New computational methods are therefore needed for transforming large amounts of unstructured data into actionable insights. The goal of our proposed project is to deliver a new generation of poverty measures, based on a combination of ubiquitous data streams and novel machine learning approaches. We propose to develop and test new approaches to (1) measure poverty and hunger with non-traditional data sources, and (2) to use these new measures to study the determinants of these outcomes. We anticipate that the results will be truly transformational for a variety of scientific disciplines and questions, and particularly for many important questions in the economics of developing countries.

New developments in sensing technologies are creating many cheap, unconventional – but also unstructured and noisy - data streams that should contain information relevant to poverty and hunger. New computational methods are therefore needed for transforming large amounts of unstructured data into actionable insights. The goal of this research project is to deliver a new generation of poverty measures, based on a combination of ubiquitous data streams and novel machine learning approaches. We will first develop and test new approaches to measure poverty and hunger, and than use these new measures to study the determinants of the outcomes. We anticipate that the results will be truly transformational for a variety of scientific disciplines and questions, and particularly affect our understanding of the economics of developing countries.

This international research project uses a combination of online survey and online experiment to test whether different material incentives for wage workers vary in legitimacy and effectiveness across countries. The experiment is played in three countries across three continents. The policy objective of the research is to identify better ways of preparing entrepreneurs to operate in other cultures, thereby fostering international growth and the spread of innovation to less developed countries. We test five main hypotheses: (1) do individuals and countries differ in which incentive mechanisms they regard as legitimate in employment contracts; (2) do workers respond more positively to incentives that they or their culture regard as legitimate; (3) do beliefs about the effectiveness of different material incentives correlate positively with perceptions about incentive legitimacy at the individual or country level; (4) are employers and managers more willing to use incentives that they believe to be effective or legitimate in their culture; and (5) do mismatched legitimacy norms across cultures lead to negative stereotypes. We also document how subjects from one country react to employers and managers from another, and whether subjects from one country are able to motivate workers in another. To do this, we have assembled a strong team from three top universities with a lot of combined experience running experiments in other countries, online and in the lab. 

How is firm productivity impacted by increased access to supplies and inputs? In particular, can supply chain innovations stimulate improvements in firm management, human capital, and overall productivity? We study this question through a new initiative recently launched in Rwanda: medical supply delivery by drones. Rwanda has partnered with the US company Zipline to capitalize on drone technology that increases the speed of delivery of medical supplies to hospitals and health centers, and the program has plans to expand to other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our project evaluates how this innovation in health supply delivery impacts health center performance.

There are many public-sector attempts to develop entrepreneurial eco-systems . Caravans of politicians and industry groups have visited Silicon Valley to develop takeaways that can be used in other cities and regions.What has been missing is systematic attempts to gain insights from the entrepreneurs and policy makers in many countries as to what aspects of the external environment they see as most pivotal /least pivotal as regards building sustainable high growing companies.

The main objective of the proposed research to is to understand the factors that contribute to the low profitability and productivity of small farmers (those with less than 10 hectares of land) in developing countries and develop ideas for a financially sustainable intervention that leads to generation of additional value not only for the small farmers but all the other players in the value chain. This project has the potential to result in a radical value chain innovation that can have huge social and economic implications. The focus of this exploratory research spanning a period of 10 months, phase one of a larger project, will be to study the entire supply chain for one crop, Potato, in one developing country, Pakistan in order to understand the underlying issues through direct empirical field work. This phase of the project will serve as validation of the core approach and lead to a more comprehensive larger-scale intervention, phase two. The proposal for the larger project will be submitted after the data collection part of this project is complete. The project will also develop ideas for how an entrepreneurial venture aimed at changing the agricultural supply and value chain could be crafted to not only benefit the small farmers but also be financially rewarding.

Climate change, globalization, and environmental degradation are leading to unprecedented levels of change and disturbance to socio-ecological systems such as fisheries. When confronted with market volatility and environmental change what type of social relations enable fishers to insulate themselves from poverty traps and other undesirable social states? This study will analyze economic efficiency and the flow of information within the Gulf of California's artisanal squid fishery using social network analysis. Relying upon the resources, relationships, and personnel provided through the SURMAR program, I will obtain catch data while soliciting demographic and relational information from participating fishermen as part of a collaborative fisheries research initiative. In addition to examining the socio-demographic dimensions of knowledge-exchange networks, I will also consider how such networks inform the ability of individuals to respond and adapt to environmentally driven changes in resource abundance.

Public infrastructure—roads, bridges, airports, electrical grids, water and sanitation systems, etc.—is fundamental to economic development and poverty alleviation. Beyond its effects on development, promotion of infrastructure has become an important component of the “soft power” projected by China and the US, respectively, and hence has implications for foreign policy. We seek funding to produce seven new case studies comparing Chinese and US-funded infrastructure projects in the developing world. Our research should help understand the roadblocks to a more effective US role in infrastructure investment in emerging economies and will add to the substantial library of case studies (https://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/lad-case-study-library) and other materials that LAD has developed over the eight years since its founding. This project will be directed by Senior Fellow Francis Fukuyama and Professor Raymond Levitt at Stanford University.