Conference location:
28 Hillhouse Avenue
 

This is a two-day conference devoted to field research in development economics, with a particular emphasis on research on topics involving imperfect or asymmetric information.  The first day of the conference is devoted to the presentation and discussion of papers describing the results of projects involving field research.  The second day is devoted to issues of methodology, beginning with formal papers on sample design, and concluding with two less formal panels on research methods.  It's very easy to end up trading stories when discussing the research process. The stories can be informative, but we suspect they will be more so in the context of an explicit organizing framework. Since many of us are struggling with issues of incomplete information, we would like to use this as a focus for this discussion. What particular demands on the field research process are imposed by thinking in terms of models in which incomplete information is central to the phenomenon of interest? How has field research influenced the way we incorporate incomplete information into our models?

We are devoting one hour per paper. Presenters should take half an hour to present, and we'll split the other half hour between discussants and floor discussion. Discussants, please be prepared to be called upon by the chair to get the discussion started, but it is not necessary to prepare formal remarks.
 

Author	Paper	Primary Discussants
Session I: Reputation, Networks, Information   Friday April 30, 9:30  Room: Common Room (basement)  Chair: Udry
Duflo/Banerjee	Reputation Effects and the Limits of Contracting (and tables)	Rai, Miller
Munshi/Banerjee	Production Networks in South India  (and tables)	Hoddinott, Okonkwo
Fafchamps	Returns to Capital Among Traders	Kremer, Munshi, Paulson
12:30 Lunch (Buffet at 28 Hillhouse, Common Room)
Session II: Credit Constraints and Microfinance   Friday April 30, 1:30  Room: B8  Chair: Guinnane
Rai	Microcredit and Vulnerability	Gugherty, Christiaensen
Paulson/Townsend	Occupation Choices and Capital Constraints (and tables)	Beegle, Karlan
3:30 Coffee Break
Session III: Experiments  Friday April 30, 4:00  Room: B8  Chair: Wantchekon
Kremer	Textbooks and Test Scores  (and tables)	Thomas, Teruel
Session IV: Sample Design  Saturday May 1, 9:00  Room: B8  Chair: Evenson
Hoddinott	Constructing Household Sampling Frames in Mali: A Tale of Two Methods (and tables)	Bettinger, Duflo
Thomas, Frankenberg, and Smith	Lost but not forgotten: Attrition in the Indonesia Family Life Survey	Fafchamps, Giles
11:00 Coffee
Panel discussion: Using Theory to Inform Research Design   Saturday May 1, 11:30  Room: B8  Chair: Schultz  Panel: Banerjee, Goldstein, Strauss
1:00 Lunch (Buffet at 28 Hillhouse, Common Room)
Panel discussion: Evolutionary Research: Interaction Between Fieldwork and Theory Construction.   Saturday, May 1, 2:30  Room: B8  Chair: Srinivasan  Panel: Fafchamps, Townsend, Udry
4:00 Wrap-up

 
This conference is made possible by a grant from the Edward and Dorothy Kempf Memorial Fund.