April 10, 2013 · 8:00 am

Journal Club: India’s Janani Suraksha Yojana, an Impact Evaluation

We’ve selected a locally grown paper for discussion in journal club this week, India’s Janani Suraksha Yojana, a conditional cash transfer programme to increase births in health facilities: an impact evaluation, by Lim et al, with a focus on the methods: the paper has “used three analytical approaches (matching, with-versus-without comparison, and differences in differences) to assess the effect of JSY on antenatal care, in-facility births, and perinatal, neonatal, and maternal deaths.”

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One response to “Journal Club: India’s Janani Suraksha Yojana, an Impact Evaluation”

  1. Abraham Flaxman
    April 14, 2013 at 4:17 pm

    This generated quite a list of follow-up readings:

    Matching:

    A cool application:

    American Academy of Pediatrics: Janet Elise Rosenbaum, Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers, Pediatrics, Vol. 123 No. 1 Jan 2009.

    What’s Known on This Subject

    Two studies have found, by using regression, that virginity pledges delay sex, but regression cannot correct for large preexisting differences between pledgers and nonpledgers.

    What This Study Adds

    We used a more robust method than regression to compare virginity pledgers with similar nonpledgers and found virtually no difference in sexual behavior or STDs and much less use of condoms.

    A validation environment that calls the method into questions

    Comparing experimental and matching methods using a large-scale voter mobilization experiment, K Arceneaux, AS Gerber, DP Green – Political Analysis, 2006 – SPM-PMSAPSA

    … Biased OLS estimates of the effect of actual contact on turnout in Iowa and Michigan … listed, analysts
    who use survey data to assess the effects of voter mobilization calls … rather between estimators
    that address the selection problem by use of randomization (instrumental variables …

    Interpreting regression results:

    Gary King, Michael Tomz, and Jason Wittenberg’s “Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation”

    Clarify Stata macro: http://gking.harvard.edu/clarify

    Differences in differences:

    How Much Should We Trust Differences-in-Differences Estimates?
    Marianne Bertrand, Esther Duflo, Sendhil Mullainathan
    NBER Working Paper No. 8841
    http://www.nber.org/papers/w8841

    Econometrics approaches in general:

    Click to access siegfried.pdf