American Economic Review Vol. 93 No. 2 2003
Fieldwork, Economic Theory, and Research on Institutions in Developing Countries
Abstract
Development economics has been the beneÞciary of a rich tradition of Þeld research. Within this broad tradition there is a huge variety of methods, from short qualitative studies in which the primary interaction between the researcher and the participants is relatively unstructured conversation to large-scale surveys designed by and perhaps loosely supervised by economists. In this note, however, I focus on one point in this broad space of research methodologies iterative Þeld research in which the collection of data through surveys is combined with detailed observation and conversation to elicit knowledge about institutions. A highly artiÞcial, but I hope useful typology is provided in Figure 1. Typically, empirical work in economics relies on existing data. However, it is becoming more common in development economics to complement existing data with relatively short, often less structured visits to the Þeld site in order to clarify aspects of the data, to better deÞne the economic environment, or to collect limited amounts of complementary data. For example, ICRISAT hosted and provided institutional support for a series of visiting scholars during the collection of the Village Level Surveys. This proved to be a relatively inexpensive mechanism that generated an important sequence of insights regarding economic institutions India (Rosenzweig (1998 EJ), Pender (1996) are examples of papers emerging from this
- DOI
- 10.1257/000282803321946895
- Volume
- 93
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 107-111
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref