Foundations of Development Policy
Examine the different facets of human development through modern empirical methods in economics while working with real data.
Foundations of Development Policy
Examine the different facets of human development through modern empirical methods in economics while working with real data.
In this course, you will study the different facets of human development through the lens of theory and statistics in a way that is both analytical and practical. You will learn how to build and apply economic models relevant to concrete development contexts and how to design and conduct a randomized control trial to learn more about these topics. You will also have the chance to gain experience working with real data using software for statistical analysis.
What you'll learn
The course will investigate the following topics:
- Poverty and undernutrition
- Nutrition and productivity
- Benefits of education and schooling decisions
- Gender and household bargaining power
- Insurance and dealing with risk
- Land, risk aversion, and property rights
- Credit market, constraints, and the classic microcredit model
- Behavioral barriers to saving
- Public finance, taxation, targeting, and transparency
- Political economy
- Measuring, modeling, and combatting corruption
Access the full syllabus here.
Prerequisites
Basic understanding of statistics and familiarity with microeconomics will be helpful for this course. There are no prerequisites, but you may find it helpful to take 14.100x (Microeconomics) and 14.310x (Data Analysis for Social Scientists) before this course
Course Readiness Check:
Our course readiness checks help you determine if you should review key concepts before starting the course.
Please use this link to access the course readiness check and answer key.
Meet your instructors
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Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics -
Professor of Economics -
Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics
Esther Duflo
Esther Duflo
Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics
Esther Duflo is the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. She is also the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics at MIT. She was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris, and at MIT. She has received numerous honors and prizes including a John Bates Clark Medal for the best American economist under 40 in 2010, a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2009. She was recognized as one of the best eight young economists by The Economist magazine, one of the 100 most influential thinkers by Foreign Policy since the list exists, and one of the “Forty under 40” most influential business leaders under forty by Fortune magazine in 2010.
To learn more, please click here.
Benjamin Olken
Benjamin Olken
Professor of Economics
Benjamin Olken is a Professor of Economics at MIT. His research focuses on political economy and public sector issues in developing countries, with a particular interest in corruption. He is a faculty Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, Co-Scientific Director of the Lab’s Southeast Asia office in Jakarta, and Co-Chair of the Lab’s Governance Initiative. Olken received his BA _summa cum laude _as a double-major in Mathematics and Ethics, Politics, and Economics from Yale University in 1997, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 2004. In 1997-1998 he was a Henry Luce Scholar, living in Jakarta, Indonesia. He joined the MIT faculty as a tenured faculty member in 2008, directly after a three-year term as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows and a one-year post-doctoral fellowship at the NBER.
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee
Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics
Abhijit Banerjee is the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Harvard University. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT. Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He is the recipient of many awards, including the inaugural Infosys Prize in 2009, and has been an honorary advisor to many organizations including the World Bank and the government of India.