Developing Jen

Hausmann and Rodrik on the need for and complexity of industrial policy. The paper argues that markets need not the usual high level articulation of public inputs to function (i.e. contract enforcement, property right, etc.) but rather that each market requires very specific public inputs. As a result, government are "doomed to choose" because they lack resources to address them all.

Hausmann, Ricardo; Rodrik, Dani "Growth Diagnostics"

Hausmann, Ricardo "The Other Hand: High Bandwidth Development Policy"

High bandwidth policy refers a mechanism to organize government interactions with the private sector so as to maximize (hence high bandwidth) the information that's communicated to the government on public inputs needed for markets to function properly.

Rodrik, Dani "Industrial Policy for the 21st Century"

Rodrik presents his argument for why industrial policy matters and how to think about it, particularly the importance of institutional structures.

Institutions

Acemoglu, Daron; Johnson, Simon; Robinson, James "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation"

Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson's papers on colonialism and institutions have been incredibly influential, this is definitely one you want to be well versed on. Argues colonists established institutions differentially based on their mortality rates, essentially set up "good" institutions (i.e. strong property rights, etc.) where they would survive and "bad, extractive" institutions where they could now. This they believe explains the divergence in economic growth since.

Rodrik, Dani "Second-Best Institutions"

Simeon Djankov, Edward Glaeser, Rafael La Porta, Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes, Andrei
Shleifer "The New Comparative Economics"

This is a really fascinating paper on institutions, talks about balancing trade off between disorder (no role for the state) and dictatorship (total state control).

Microfinance

Banerjee, Abhijit; Duflo, Esther "The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence From a Randomized Evaluation"

Poverty

Banerjee, Abhijit; Duflo, Esther "The Economic Lives of the Poor"

Explains what we know about how the poor live: what they spend their money on, how they earn their income, what markets they have access to, etc.

Chen, Shaohua; Ravaillon, Martin "How Have the World's Poorest Fared Since the Early 1980s?"

Looks at poverty trends across the globe since the 1980s, shows how the composition of the poor has shifted as China has grown and Sub Saharan Africa has worsened.

Angus Deaton "Price Indexes, Inequality, and the Measurement of Global Poverty"

Somewhat dry but explains the challenges in aggregating poverty measurements at the global level.

Public Service Delivery

Chaudhury, Nazmul; Hammer, Jeffrey; Kremer, Michael; Muralidharan, Karthik; and Rogers, F.
Halsey. “Missing in Action: Teacher and Health Worker Absence in Developing Countries”

As far as I know this is the paper on absenteeism. They survey about a dozen countries acorss the globe and find similar rates of absenteeism and trends in terms of who is absent. It's a must read for anyone who cares about service delivery.

Cohen, Jessica and Dupas, Pascaline "Free Distribution or Cost-Sharing? Evidence from a Randomized Malaria Prevention Experiment"

This is the study on bed nets, looks at the justification for charging for them and the evidence on whether the arguments hold. It's really a must read for most of us, since bed nets as fishing nets comes up so often as a justification for "aid is bad" arguments. This paper explains why giving away bed nets for free makes sense.

Kremer, Michael and Alaka Hola (2008) “Pricing and Access: Evidence from
Randomized Evaluations in Education and Health”

This is a great paper that reviews what randomized evaluations have taught us about subsidizing access, both in terms of subsidizing costs as well as programs that actually pay people to consume services.

Kremer, Michael and Miguel, Ted "The Illusion of Sustainability"

This paper looks at the justification for user fees and what experiments have to say about the theoretical arguments (hint: they don't hold up).

Country Studies

Radelet, Steve "Reviving Economic Growth in Liberia"