YouSaid · the spoken record

Esther Duflo

lines on the record: 71
first: 2019-12-18
most recent: 2019-12-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, if the policies are very different from one country to the other and are a complicated function of the context in Ireland, you need very low tax rates. But in South Korea, you need industrial policy that a little bit reflects our difficulty as economists to have come up with guidance for the next piece. Because the next, you'll take, I don't know, Ethiopia and they want to grow. The question becomes, do we have anything in the experience of the Basque country that will help us for sure predict the set of steps that Ethiopia needs to take that is going to lead them to grow? My firm belief is that we don't, but if you do then, you have a side gig into helping Ethiopia. And that would be great.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, I think that it's good if it's not just the elite who are running our cities. So back to my point of trying to make it a general tool, that's the elite of the kind of academic movement, but you could say, well, there are still academics. So in the broad scheme of things, they are still the elite. So my problem is not with the elite. My problem is with the attitude of the elite with respect to everyone else. I don't even know what elite means in this context. But if us economists as a profession spend more time trying to understand what are the problem of people who do not have the comfort of an academic career behind them, then we can make progress in understanding the issues and therefore potentially in thinking through policies that might help solve these issues. So it would be a bit hypocritical of me to be against the a little bit given that I am the elite in some sense, like from when I was born. It's the type of problem that you choose to put your attention on that matters.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things we are doing as a network is raising a lot of money to redistribute to other people widely. JPL has 400 researchers that are affiliated to it or invited researchers. Many of them quite, quite junior. So that sort of makes the, I think it was very important to us, and I think we've been quite successful at it, at making the tool more generally available. It's never going to be like running a regression from your computer. But my philosophy is that if you have the drive and you're willing to put in your own sweat equity, you can do it. And our students and many other students who are not in top institutions are doing it.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it would be the case if we had not been mindful of this problem from the beginning. And it might still be the case to some extent, but I actually think that we've put a lot of effort in avoiding it to be the case. So when you take an organization like JPAL, just in India, we have 200 staff members, and we have at any given time thousand people running survey. They are not running. I say we, but these people are not running my project. These people are running the projects of dozens and dozens of researchers. And when I started, I couldn't have started without having the backing of MIT because it was such a risky proposition that you needed to be able to easily risk capital kind of things. But at this point, because of this infrastructure, it's much more normal sense. People can get in with no funding of their own, in part because”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ecosystem where that kind of war becomes easier because policymakers are interested, funders are interested, talent is interested, and because there are some things that are eased. Like when we started even the Hyderabad project we visited, we were kind of still learning as we went and we made mistakes and we're still making mistakes, but few are now because there is an infrastructure and some learnings. This infrastructure can then be given to other younger people that have more imaginative great ideas to run with. So I've kind of always been more interested in doing that and using my own work as a little bit of a testing ground, you know, trying new things that are quite risky because it doesn't matter to me if that fails. I have done you.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always try to be behind the money. So I think a lot of problems of some centers sometimes in academia is you get some money to do something and then you have to the idea to match the money. We were always had some idea before and the money comes. So at some level the money is always the constraining factor at any point in time. Now you could say why don't you get more talent to get more money but there are some limits to that. Another thing is I'm not sure I'm aiming at world conquest in the sense that I'm more interested”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To lead, and she put her mark to it. And we were kind of behind as enabler. So that's to at that level. That's still true today, I think. And it's true at the smaller level of the project where everybody has a piece that they own and they run with it. And, you know, they'll make mistakes. And then we have to correct the mistakes. But the ownership of the piece of the project means that you get a lot of effort and a lot of creativity of everyone. And then I must say that I'm in a very good business for no credit to me because the people who get attracted to this work tend to be very committed and kind of passion driven. So you get very good material to start with. So you just need to give them a little bit of guidance and they move.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I kind of stumbled onto this because most academics I was not born to be a manager. So I don't have a, you know, I didn't bring a pre-made philosophy to this business, but I developed one and it has several elements to it, but the key is that I'm not a micro-manager. The key is that you want to give people pretty clear vision of where we're heading and then give them a lot of ownership for how we're getting there. And that is true for the whole organization of JPAL, which is the sum total, the network of all these researchers, where from the very beginning with the first executive director, Rachel Clenaster, it was really her”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have access to money, and that's kind of one of the big reasons why the growth is lower. the investment opportunity and who has the money. And that's what microeconomists call misallocation.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That will kind of create a way for you to get your assets and then progressively reimburse. So that's kind of a funny way to save, but I think it's a reasonable response in the environment. And then there are some people who are borrowing for business. And we have a recent paper where we look at the same setting again, but now eight years after Microfinance was introduced. And in fact, two years after it's gone, because there was a huge crisis of microfinance. And we look at the group of people who had a business before microcredit even got in. So there are people who actually borrowed to invest in their business often. And for those guys, we actually see that some of these people actually have very, very high rates. So there are some people with very high rates of returns, as you were saying, 50% or 60%. So first of all, there are not very many, and they are not necessarily the ones.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not the same household that keep bowing and bowing and bowing. In fact, the number of repeat customers is less than you might think. People join microfinance, take a loan, buy something. You know, it can be like a durable good, for example, like a fridge or a cycle. And then use their regular income to repay it. So for some households, that's a very, very expensive way to save in some sense. Because what they are looking for is accumulating enough money to buy this durable good that they want for their household. But it's very difficult to save because there are no saving instruments and there are a lot of temptations, et cetera. So the microcredit officer serves as a kind of commitment device. Once you bought the money and the incentive of the credit officer is very strongly to make sure that everybody reimburses,”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it actually does not imply that because the plurality of this household, maybe the majority of this household, does not actually invest in any productive activity with the money. So most of the interests are paid from people's regular jobs.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very important topic. Now, should everybody do that? Well, I guess there are probably diminishing returns to effort on the particular problems and there are other interesting problems to look at. So I'm glad that people continue working on this. And I think the work is only going to deepen both on understanding the mechanism better, understanding variations around it, and understanding how to make it adopted as policy, because I completely agree with you that of everything that I've done, studied in my life, that this is one with the most important spectacular results.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should certainly continue to do more working on this study and working on the questions you were asking about the scale up and working on how various modalities of it. Already the study you mentioned in science was already a sign that there is at least some interest in the economics profession to focus on this question because it was the second paper on this, the first paper was the evaluation of the mothership program in Bangladesh and people didn't say oh that's a nice program Let's go and study something new. Instead Dean Khan led a group of people to replicate this same evaluation in seven different countries which was a very major undertaking involving lots and lots of researchers and NGOs so the fact that people were willing to do that to write a 12 page paper in science at the end of it suggests that there is really a recognition that it's”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it is because it's already skilled. And even the evaluation by Robin Burgess and others was done on a quite large scale.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A good question to which we should have an answer soonish because there is now scale up of this programs in various countries and in particular in India. Some state governments in India are scaling this up as part of their program. So they are mainstreaming it as part of their program still with the support of the original microfinance institutions that have been running this program but hiring many many many people. So you will be able to see whether this was you could do this with like the best NGO worker of the country and you only have hundreds of those and then that's done or whether this is something that can be spread. What is encouraging in this respect is that in Bangladesh the program is huge as it is. It's enormous. It reaches hundreds of thousands of families as it is. So to some extent we already have the answer to how”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“not been involved in productive activities often, or living of alms or of very petty works, and they are making them kind of confident that they can do it.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complementary human capital for taking care of your assets. So, for example, when people are giving cash, some people are given cash to start a petty business, but I have no idea even how to go to the market because the poorest person in the village are also excluded from productive activities. They have not really been working or if they have been working, is that made in very local circumstances, they really have no idea. So the coaches are physically taking them to the market. This is how you take the bus. And this is where you buy the trinkets that you're going to send in the village. And this is where you bargain for your trinkets and then come back with a trinket and sell them. So there is an amount of technical skills, if you will. And the third component, which is harder to quantify but probably very important as well, is confidence training. So they are meeting in groups and those are people who've”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just from the experiment, this particular experiment, it would be hard to tell because one could say, well, you should try to do cash only, and then we can see. But subsequently, Abijid and Tin Carlan were involved in an experiment in Ghana where they just gave goods. So they call it a good drop paper. So just goods were given. And without the coaching. And there they find very clearly that the coaching makes a big difference, that people who you give just the assets to have more assets but it doesn't serve as a springboard for more activities. So descriptively what the coaches do is two things. Number one is avoid the temptation of liquidating the assets quite early. So if you give people cows and they don't feel confident using them, then the easiest thing to do is to sell them. And then they have cash, but they don't have the productive asset anymore. The second thing is to provide the”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came from. So I think that's a very important paper that is making a big splash and show people continue. And in our case, the part of the study was that I was the most involved with was in West Bengal. And we also continue to study them. After 10 years, we are studying their children as well. We are studying the impact on migration to go to not just, oh, there is an effect, but how all of these effects are kind of building on each other.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think it has been studied a lot and it has also been adopted as policy after this original study and other studies. So the original project comes from Bangladesh and there actually has been a study and a long run study in Bangladesh by Robin Burgess and others who are now looking at a household tenure hence and you continue to see large differences between the households who got the transfer and they have a recent paper that they just released to say that they continue to study it where they are really putting a lot of theory into it to look at the data through the lens of asking actually is there a poverty trap in which some of these households have fallen and they show that in fact there is such a thing with a threshold of wealth above which if households can go above they can grow to a point where they are significantly better off and if they are below it they go back to wherever they are.”
2019-12-18 · Conversations with Tyler · Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source