Craig McIntosh

Expertise

McIntosh is a development economist who specializes in evaluating the impact of interventions in  financial markets in developing countries.

Current Projects

McIntosh is currently working on a variety of evaluation projects. In Guatemala, along with a team from UC Berkeley, USF, and Universidad Rafael Landivar he is analyzing the impact of information-sharing between lenders on credit market outcomes and economic mobility. Other randomized work includes the impact of the introduction of cell phones into agricultural communities in Rwanda (with the Grameen Technology Center), and a community-driven development project in Tanzania (with researchers from the World Bank). Non-experimental evaluation work has looked at the impact of bundling health insurance into microfinance in Uganda, and the impact of the U.S. Endangered Species act on the probability of species recovery.

Background Notes

McIntosh joined IR/PS in 2003. He has done aid work in Somalia with the International Rescue Committee, and spent a year on a Fulbright grant as Research Director at FINCA/Uganda, a major microfinance lender.

 

Recent Publications

(Click to View Recent Working Papers)

“The Supply and Demand Side Impacts of Credit Market Information,” with Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet, Forthcoming, Journal of Development Economics.

“The Demography of Mexican Migration to the United States,” with Gordon Hanson, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, January 2009, 99:2, pp. 1-9.

“The Short-Term Impacts of a Schooling Conditional Cash Transfer Program on the Sexual Behavior of Young Women,” with Sarah Baird, Ephraim Chirwa, and Berk Özler. Forthcoming, Health Economics.

“Tracking the Introduction of the Village Phone Product in Rwanda,” with Michael Futch, Forthcoming, Information Technologies in International Development.

"Microfinance and Home Improvement: Using Retrospective Panel Data to Measure Program Effects on Fundamental Events," with Gonzalo Villaran and Bruce Wydick, Forthcoming, World Development.

"Using the Error in Pre-Election Polls to Test for the Presence of Pork," with Jacob Allen. The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy (Contributions), Vol. 9, Issue 1, 2009.

"The Great Mexican Emigration," with Gordon Hanson (NBER, Working Paper, 13675), Forthcoming, Review of Economics and Statistics.

“Estimating Treatment Effects from Spatial Policy Experiments: An Application to Ugandan Microfinance,” Review of Economics and Statistics, 7(06), February 2008.

“The Effectiveness of Listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act: An Econometric Analysis Using Matching Methods,” with Paul Ferraro and Monica Ospina. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Vol. 54, 2007.

“Credit Information Systems in Less-Developed Countries: A Test with Microfinance in Guatemala,” with Jill Luoto and Bruce Wydick, forthcoming (January 2007), Economic Development and Cultural Change.

“How Rising Competition among Microfinance Institutions Affects Incumbent Lenders,” with Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet, The Economic Journal 115, October 2005, pp. 987-1004.

“Competition and Microfinance,” with Bruce Wydick, Journal of Development Economics 78, December 2005, pp. 271-298.

Recent Working Papers

(Click to View Recent Publications)


“Reputation in a Public Goods Game: Taking the Design of Credit Bureaus to the Lab,” with Elisabeth Sadoulet, Steven Buck, and Tomas Rosada.

“Designing Cost-Effective Conditional Cash Transfer Programs in Sub-Saharan Africa,” with Sarah Baird and Berk Özler.

“Birth Rates and Border Crossings: The Demographic Push behind Latin American Emigration,” with Gordon Hanson.

“The Squeaky Wheels Get the Grease: Applications and Targeting in Tanzania’s TASAF,” with Sarah Baird and Berk Özler.

“What Do Credit Bureaus Do? Understanding Screening, Incentive, and Credit Expansion Effects,” with Bruce Wydick.

"Has Better Health Care Contributed to Higher HIV Prevalence in Sub-Saharan Africa?"

"Identifying Non-Linearities in Fixed Effects Models," with Wolfram Schlenker.

IRGN 446 Applied Data Analysis & Statistical Decision Making

Course Description:

This is a practical, hands-on course whose purpose is the use of statistics to estimate causal policy impacts using real-world data. Emphasis throughout the course will be placed on methods for gaining statistical identification. The course uses Stata and covers cover advanced cross-sectional techniques, time-series analysis, and the use of panel data. Students are required to write an original, well-identified, and policy-relevant research paper using primary data.

IRGN 451 Economic Development

Course Description:

The purpose of this course is to bring the tools of economic analysis to bear on current policy debates in economic development. The micro-level foundation of the course will be based in the New Institutional Economics, and the ways in which this set of tools helps us to understand the role of culture, households, and traditional institutions. The course will place strong emphasis on empirical methods for policy analysis.

IRGN 417 Microfinance

Course Description:

This course will begin by examining the financial landscape in poor countries, including the predominance of small-scale enterprises as income sources for the poor. Next, we investigate how microfinance contracts overcome problems which had previously barred the extension of business credit in many environments, and how this kind of solution can be extended to other financial services. We will examine best practices in the field, drawing on case studies of successful and failed institutions to try to understand how the twin goals of sustainability and servicing the poor can be achieved. The difficulties present in assessing the impact of microfinance programs will be illustrated. The course will conclude with a study of the future progress of these new financial services and specific policies which can help to foster access to credit by the poor.

ECON 240 Economic Development

Course Description:

This course serves as an introduction to the empirical study of microeconomic development. Throughout the course we will discuss methods for obtaining and analyzing the kinds of data needed for the testing of theory and the evaluation of policy interventions in development contexts. The course introduces doctoral students to the latest microeconomic research in development, and focuses on marrying theory on the functioning of imperfect markets with state of the art empirical techniques for identifying causal effects.

IRGN 490 Designing Field Experiments

Course Description:

Co-taught with Karthik Muralidharan.

This course covers the applied practice of quantitative impact evaluation. The benchmark methodology in the course will be randomized controlled trials, and the broader set of non-experimental tools will be understood through the ways in which they differ from random assignment. Practical issues in research and survey design will be discussed as how different types of treatment effects can be measured in field studies. This is a joint MA/PhD class, and it will use Stata for course assignments. Students are asked to write a research prospectus structured like a grant funding proposal, laying out the underlying policy question of the project, identifying a good population for the study, correctly interpreting the impacts that can be measured from a research design, and demonstrating the practical viability of the project.