Does the heterogeneity of project implementers affect the program participation of beneficiaries?: Evidence from rural Cambodia

Ayako Wakano (), Hiroyuki Yamada and Daichi Shimamoto
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Ayako Wakano: Graduate School of Economics, Osaka University, JAPAN

No 14-21, Discussion Papers in Economics and Business from Osaka University, Graduate School of Economics

Abstract: Using the dataset collected for assessment of a post-harvest technology project in rural Cambodia, we focused on the heterogeneous social preferences of project implementers, often overlooked in the literature of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT). Our study focuses on the gimplementer effect h on program participation for the treated farmers. We show the possibility that heterogeneous program participation of ordinary farmers across the treated villages could be induced due to heterogeneity in the characteristics of project staff. In particular, we show the altruism of project staff, measured by the dictator game, consistently increases participation and the number of participations in the training sessions of beneficiaries. This type of heterogeneity in project staffs f preferences across treatment sites might yield noises in mean effects estimated using RCT methods conducted at a certain cluster level, which undermines the external validity of the estimated results. While RCT methods are very powerful tools for many program and policy evaluations, we cannot emphasize too much the importance of the way how an actual project is implemented.

Keywords: social preference; program evaluation; heterogeneity in treatment effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D03 O22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2014-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-exp, nep-ppm and nep-sea
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Journal Article: Does the Heterogeneity of Project Implementers Affect the Programme Participation of Beneficiaries?: Evidence from Rural Cambodia (2017)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osk:wpaper:1421

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