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It pays to be ignorant: A simple political economy of rigorous program evaluation
Abstract
This paper attempts to explain the scarcity of rigorous evaluations of public policy. I build a positive model to explain the "stylized fact" that there is under investment in the creation of reliable empirical knowledge about the impacts of public sector actions. The model shows how "advocates" of particular issues or solutions - the public action equivalent of entrepreneurs - have incentives to under invest in knowledge creation because having credible estimates of the impact of their preferred program may undermine their ability to mobilize political (budgetary) support.
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Citations
Cited by
Site Selection Bias in Program Evaluation *
Allcott, H. (2015) · The Quarterly Journal of Economics · doi:10.1093/qje/qjv015 · Cited by 426
Community Based (and Driven) Development: A Critical Review
Mansuri, G., & Rao, V. (2004) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.501663 · Cited by 313
(2011) · The University of Bath Online Publications Store (The University of Bath) · Cited by 284
(2013) · BIBSYS Brage (BIBSYS (Norway)) · Cited by 9
Metadata
- Authors
- Pritchett, L.
- Venue
- The Journal of Policy Reform
- Publisher
- Informa UK Limited
- Published
- 2002-12
- Volume
- 5
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 251-269
- ISSN
- 1384-1289 (ISSN-L)
- 1477-2736
- OpenAlex
- W2020332019
- Cited by
- 178
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 6.50
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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How to cite
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: It pays to be ignorant: A simple political economy of rigorous program evaluation. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1080/1384128032000096832
- The paper
- Pritchett, L. (2002). It pays to be ignorant: A simple political economy of rigorous program evaluation. The Journal of Policy Reform. https://doi.org/10.1080/1384128032000096832
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
