Esther Duflo,
an MIT economist and a co-founder of Jameel Poverty Action Lab, is passionate
about eliminating poverty in the developing world. She is best known for her work where she
applies randomized control trials (RCTs) to economic and development
problems. Click here for a crash course
on RCTs. Alternatively, you can watch
the 20-minute video below. Angus
Deaton’s critique of RCTs is available here.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, Amir Kermani, James Kwak and Todd Mitton have written a paper on whether firms connected to Timothy Geithner benefited from these connections. They do so by looking at how stocks of these firms reacted to the announcement that he was a nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008. They find that there were large abnormal returns for connected firms. Below is the paper's abstract and the full paper is available here . The announcement of Timothy Geithner as nominee for Treasury Secretary in November 2008 produced a cumulative abnormal return for financial firms with which he had a connection. This return was about 6% after the first full day of trading and about 12% after ten trading days. There were subsequently abnormal negative returns for connected firms when news broke that Geithner's confirmation might be derailed by tax issues. Excess returns for connected firms may reflect the perceived impact of relying on the advice of a small ne...