Econ 551,
Section 1: Topics in Development Economics
Monday/Wednesday 12:30-1:50
David Kinley Hall, Room 223
Instructor: Richard Akresh
Office Hours: Monday 11:30-12:15/Wednesday 3:30-4:15 or by appointment
Office: David Kinley Hall, Room 101C
Email: akresh@illinois.edu
Announcements:
1-page proposal for your research project is due September 19. Please email me a copy of the proposal and give me a hard copy in class. You should discuss what topic you will be working on, the research question you will explore, and what data you have tracked down so far. This is preliminary and topics can be changed based on data availability, but I want you to have spent considerable time by this date thinking about the project and searching for data you can use.
Final papers are due Friday, December 9 at 5:00 pm. Please drop off a hard copy in my department mailbox and email me a copy of the paper.
Links to the following:
Old course syllabus (will be updated in mid-August)
Possible Places to look for Datasets for Research Paper Topics:
These are just a few suggestions to get you started. Better still is to think about data that may be available from your home country (or from a previous job) or think about institutional knowledge you may have about a region or subject area that might be useful for writing an empirical paper.
BREAD website has links to specific datasets and to individual development faculty web pages: (http://ibread.org/)
J-Pal (Poverty Action Lab) has data available from several program evaluation projects in developing countries (http://www.povertyactionlab.com/)
IPA-Innovations for Poverty Action has data available from several program evaluation projects in developing countries (http://www.poverty-action.org/)
Macarthur Foundation has a searchable database of developing country datasets (http://ipl.econ.duke.edu:8080/survey/)
RAND has a number of public surveys called the family life
surveys, including the IFLS from
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has a lot of public access surveys: (www.ifpri.org)
Center for the Study of African Economies has a number of
public datasets including household panel survey data from
Chris Udry has data available from a survey of farmers in
Markus Goldstein (at the World Bank) has a website about fieldwork in development economics with links to datasets and questionnaires (http://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/FIELDWORK/default.html)
New Immigrant Survey--Survey of legal immigrants to the
Mexican Health and Aging Study (http://www.mhasweb.org/)
Mexican Migration Project (http://mmp.opr.princeton.edu/home-en.aspx)
World Bank surveys (www.worldbank.org)
International Peace Research Institute data on civil conflicts (PRIO): (www.prio.no)
Mexican Family Life Survey (MXFLS)
Demographic and Health Surveys (http://dhsprogram.com/)