Gertler, Paul Jerome

Person:
Gertler, Paul Jerome

Fields of Specialization

Impact evaluation, Health economics

ORCID

0000-0003-0280-7513

External Links

PaulGertler

Last updated: January 31, 2023

Biography

Paul Gertler is the Li Ka Shing Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley where he holds appointments in the Haas School of Business and the School of Public Health. He is also the Scientific Director of the UC Center for Effective Global Action. Dr. Gertler is an internationally recognized expert in impact evaluation. Dr. Gertler was Chief Economist of the Human Development Network of the World Bank from 2004-2007 and the Founding Chair of the Board of Directors of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) from 2009-2012. At the World Bank he led an effort to institutionalize and scale up impact evaluation for learning what works in human development. He is the author of the bestselling textbook Applied Impact Evaluation published by the World Bank Press. He has been a Principal Investigator on a large number of at-scale multi-site impact evaluations including Mexico’s CCT program, PROGRESA/OPORTUNIDADES, and Rwanda’s Health Care Pay-for-Performance scheme. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin and prior to UC Berkeley has held academic appointments at Harvard, RAND, and SUNY Stony Brook.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 21

Impact Evaluation in Practice, Second Edition
(Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank, 2016-09-13) Gertler, Paul J.; Martinez, Sebastian; Premand, Patrick; Rawlings, Laura B.; Vermeersch, Christel M. J.
The second edition of the Impact Evaluation in Practice handbook is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to impact evaluation for policy makers and development practitioners. First published in 2011, it has been used widely across the development and academic communities. The book incorporates real-world examples to present practical guidelines for designing and implementing impact evaluations. Readers will gain an understanding of impact evaluations and the best ways to use them to design evidence-based policies and programs. The updated version covers the newest techniques for evaluating programs and includes state-of-the-art implementation advice, as well as an expanded set of examples and case studies that draw on recent development challenges. It also includes new material on research ethics and partnerships to conduct impact evaluation. The handbook is divided into four sections: Part One discusses what to evaluate and why; Part Two presents the main impact evaluation methods; Part Three addresses how to manage impact evaluations; Part Four reviews impact evaluation sampling and data collection. Case studies illustrate different applications of impact evaluations. The book links to complementary instructional material available online, including an applied case as well as questions and answers. The updated second edition will be a valuable resource for the international development community, universities, and policy makers looking to build better evidence around what works in development.
Effect of the Jamaica Early Childhood Stimulation Intervention on Labor Market Outcomes at Age 31
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-09) Heckman, James; Gertler, Paul; Pinto, Rodrigo; Chang-Lopez, Susan M.; Grantham-McGregor, Sally; Walker, Susan; Vermeersch, Christel; Wright, Amika S.
This paper reports the labor market effects of the Jamaica Early Childhood Stimulation intervention at age 31. The study is a small-sample randomized early childhood education stimulation intervention targeting stunted children living in the poor neighborhoods of Kingston, Jamaica. Implemented in 1987–89, treatment consisted of a two-year, home-based intervention designed to improve nutrition and the quality of mother-child interactions to foster cognitive, language, and psycho-social skills. The original sample was 127 stunted children between ages 9 and 24 months. The study was able to track and interview 75 percent of the original sample 30 years after the intervention, both still living in Jamaica and migrated abroad. The findings reveal large and statistically significant effects on income and schooling; the treatment group had 43 percent higher hourly wages and 37 percent higher earnings than the control group. This is a substantial increase over the treatment effect estimated for age 22, when a 25 percent increase in earnings was observed.
Financing Municipal Water and Sanitation Services in Nairobi’s Informal Settlements
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-07) Coville, Aidan; Galiani, Sebastian; Gertler, Paul; Yoshida, Susumu
This study estimates the impacts of two interventions implemented as field experiments in informal settlements by Nairobi’s water and sanitation utility to improve revenue collection efficiency and last mile connection loan repayment: (i) face-to-face engagement between utility staff and customers to encourage payment and (ii) contract enforcement for service disconnection due to nonpayment in the form of transparent and credible disconnection notices. While there is no effect of the engagement, the study finds large effects of enforcement on payment. There is no effect on access to water, perceptions of utility fairness or quality of service delivery, on the relationships between tenants and property owners, or on tenant mental well-being nine months after the intervention. To counterbalance the increase in payments, property owners increased rental income by renting out additional space. Taken together these results suggest that transparent contract enforcement was effective at improving revenue collection efficiency without incurring large social or political costs.
Promoting Parental Involvement in Schools: Evidence from Two Randomized Experiments
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-10) Barrera-Osorio, Felipe; Gertler, Paul; Nakajima, Nozomi; Patrinos, Harry Anthony
Parental involvement programs aim to increase school-and-parent communication and support children's overall learning environment. This paper examines the effects of low-cost, group-based parental involvement interventions in Mexico using data from two randomized controlled trials. The first experiment provided financial resources to parent associations. The second experiment provided information to parents about how to support their children's learning. Overall, the interventions induced different types of parental engagement in schools. The information intervention changed parenting behavior at home -- with large effects among indigenous parents who have historically been discriminated and socially excluded -- and improved student behavior in school. The grants did not impact parent or student behaviors. Notably, the paper does not find impacts of either intervention on educational achievement. To understand these 0 effects, the paper explores how social ties between parents and teachers evolved over the course of the two interventions. Parental involvement interventions led to significant changes in perceived trustworthiness between teachers and parents. The results suggest that parental involvement interventions can backfire if institutional rules are unclear about the expectations of parents and teachers as parents increase their involvement in schools.
School-Based Management and Learning Outcomes: Experimental Evidence from Colima, Mexico
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) Garcia-Moreno, Vicente; Gertler, Paul; Patrinos, Harry Anthony
A school-based management program was implemented Mexico in 2001 and continued until 2014. This national program, Programa Escuelas de Calidad, was considered a key intervention to improve learning outcomes. In 2006, the national program was evaluated in the Mexican state of Colima, being the first experimental evaluation of the national program. All schools were invited to participate in the program; a random selection was performed to select the treatment and control groups among all the applicants. An intent-to-treat approach did not detect any impact on learning outcomes; a formal school-based management intervention plus a monetary grant was not enough to improve learning outcomes. First, the schools in the evaluation sample, control and treatment, were schools with high learning outcomes. Second, these schools had experienced some years of regular school-based management practices before the evaluation. A difference-in-difference design is used to identify heterogeneous effects of the program on learning outcomes. The difference-in-difference approach shows that the intensity of treatment increased test scores during the first year of the intervention.
Impact Evaluation in Practice, First Edition
(World Bank, 2011) Gertler, Paul J.; Martinez, Sebastian; Premand, Patrick; Rawlings, Laura B.; Vermeersch, Christel M. J.
The Impact Evaluation in Practice handbook is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to impact evaluation for policymakers and development practitioners. The book incorporates real-world examples to present practical guidelines for designing and implementing evaluations. Readers will gain an understanding of the uses of impact evaluation and the best ways to use evaluations to design policies and programs that are based on evidence of what works most effectively. The handbook is divided into three sections: Part One discusses what to evaluate and why; Part Two outlines the theoretical underpinnings of impact evaluation; and Part Three examines how to implement an evaluation. Case studies illustrate different methods for carrying out impact evaluations.
Long-Run Effects of Temporary Incentives on Medical Care Productivity
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06) Celhay, Pablo; Gertler, Paul; Giovagnoli, Paula; Vermeersch, Christel
The adoption of new clinical practice patterns by medical care providers is often challenging, even when the patterns are believed to be efficacious and profitable. This paper uses a randomized field experiment to examine the effects of temporary financial incentives paid to medical care clinics for the initiation of prenatal care in the first trimester of pregnancy. The rate of early initiation of prenatal care was 34 percent higher in the treatment group than in the control group while the incentives were being paid, and this effect persisted at least 15 months and likely 24 months or more after the incentives ended. These results are consistent with a model where the incentives enable providers to address the fixed costs of overcoming organizational inertia in innovation, and suggest that temporary incentives may be effective at motivating improvements in long-run provider performance at a substantially lower cost than permanent incentives.
Rewarding Provider Performance to Enable a Healthy Start to Life : Evidence from Argentina's Plan Nacer
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-05) Giovagnoli, Paula; Gertler, Paul; Martinez, Sebastian
Argentina's Plan Nacer provides insurance for maternal and child health care to uninsured families. The program allocates funding to provinces based on enrollment of beneficiaries and adds performance incentives based on indicators of the use and quality of maternal and child health care services and health outcomes. The provinces use these resources to pay health facilities to provide maternal and child health care services to beneficiaries. This paper analyzes the impact of Plan Nacer on birth outcomes. The analysis uses data from the universe of birth records in seven Argentine provinces for 2004 to 2008 and exploits the geographic phasing in of Plan Nacer over time. The paper finds that the program increases the use and quality of prenatal care as measured by the number of visits and the probability of receiving a tetanus vaccine. Beneficiaries' probability of low birth-weight is estimated to be reduced by 19 percent. Beneficiaries have a 74 percent lower chance of in-hospital neonatal mortality in larger facilities and approximately half this reduction comes from preventing low birth weight and half from better postnatal care. The analysis finds that the cost of saving a disability-adjusted life year through the program was $814, which is highly cost-effective compared with Argentina's $6,075 gross domestic product per capita over this period. Although there are small negative spillover effects on prenatal care utilization of non-beneficiary populations in clinics covered by Plan Nacer, no spillover is found on their birth outcomes.
Cash for Coolers : Evaluating a Large-Scale Appliance Replacement Program in Mexico
(American Economic Association, 2014-11) Davis, Lucas W.; Fuchs, Alan; Gertler, Paul
This paper evaluates a large-scale appliance replacement program in Mexico that from 2009 to 2012 helped 1.9 million households replace their old refrigerators and air conditioners with energy-efficient models. Using household-level billing records from the universe of Mexican residential customers, we find that refrigerator replacement reduces electricity consumption by 8 percent, about one-quarter of what was predicted by ex ante analyses. Moreover, we find that air conditioning replacement actually increases electricity consumption. Overall, we find that the program is an expensive way to reduce externalities from energy use, reducing carbon dioxide emissions at a program cost of over $500 per ton.
Using Provider Performance Incentives to Increase HIV Testing and Counseling Services in Rwanda
(Elsevier, 2014-12-12) Bautista-Arredondo, Sergio; de Walque, Damien; Kwan, Ada; Gertler, Paul J.; de Dieu Bizimana, Jean; Binagwaho, Agnès; Vermeersch, Christel; Condo, Jeanine
Paying for performance provides financial rewards to medical care providers for improvements in performance measured by utilization and quality of care indicators. In 2006, Rwanda began a pay for performance scheme to improve health services delivery, including HIV/AIDS services. Using a prospective quasi-experimental design, this study examines the scheme's impact on individual and couples HIV testing. We find a positive impact of pay for performance on HIV testing among married individuals (10.2 percentage points increase). Paying for performance also increased testing by both partners by 14.7 percentage point among discordant couples in which only one of the partners is an AIDS patient.