Alan [user:field_middlename] de Brauw

Alan de Brauw

Senior Research Fellow
IFPRI
Estados Unidos de América

Alan de Brauw is a Senior Research Fellow in the Markets, Trade, and Institutions Division. He has a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California at Davis; prior to joining IFPRI, he was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Williams College. His research has focused on understanding the evolution of rural labor markets in a developing economy and the effects of migration on source households; he has also conducted randomized and non-randomized evaluations of conditional cash transfer programs and agricultural interventions. His work has been published in journals such as the Journal of Development Economics, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, the British Journal of Nutrition, and Economic Development and Cultural Change

My contributions

  • Impact evaluation, and particularly randomized control trials, are a credible way to measure the benefits of such programs. Additionally, they can help answer questions related to intervention design, helping improve the design of interventions over time. One of the main challenges in conducting impact evaluations in development settings is to establish a counterfactual; the counterfactual represents the state of the world that intervention participants would have experienced in its absence. Obviously, the counterfactual does not take place spontaneously, so a control group has to be constructed to mimic the counterfactual. From the research perspective, the control group can be randomly chosen