Craig T. McIntosh
ctmcintosh@ucsd.edu
Phone: (858) 822-1125
Fax: (858) 534-3939
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0519
Office: #1305
Education
Ph.D., UC Berkeley, 2003 (agricultural and resource economics)
M.A., UC Berkeley, 1999 (agricultural and resource economics)
B.A., UC Santa Cruz, 1993 (economics)
Programs and Centers
International Development and Nonprofit Management Career Track
International Economics Career Track
Biography
CV
McIntosh is a development economist whose work focuses on program evaluation. His main research interest is the design of institutions which promote the provision of financial services to micro-entrepreneurs. He has conducted field evaluations of innovative anti-poverty policies in Mexico, Guatemala, Malawi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania. He is currently working on research projects investigating how to boost savings among the poor, on whether schooling can be used as a tool to fight HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, and on mechanisms to improve the long-term viability of Fair Trade markets.
Perspectives
McIntosh can comment on issues related to credit, insurance, and savings markets in developing countries, as well as on how to evaluate policy impacts. This includes how to design and conduct randomized field trials, how to design quasi-experimental impact assessments, and how institutional data or retrospective surveys may be used to conduct an ex-post assessment.
Expertise
McIntosh is a development economist who specializes in evaluating the impact of interventions in financial markets in developing countries.
Current Projects
McIntosh is currently working on a variety of evaluation projects. In Guatemala, along with a team from UC Berkeley, USF, and Universidad Rafael Landivar he is analyzing the impact of information-sharing between lenders on credit market outcomes and economic mobility. Other randomized work includes the impact of the introduction of cell phones into agricultural communities in Rwanda (with the Grameen Technology Center), and a community-driven development project in Tanzania (with researchers from the World Bank). Non-experimental evaluation work has looked at the impact of bundling health insurance into microfinance in Uganda, and the impact of the U.S. Endangered Species act on the probability of species recovery.
Background Notes
McIntosh joined IR/PS in 2003. He has done aid work in Somalia with the International Rescue Committee, and spent a year on a Fulbright grant as Research Director at FINCA/Uganda, a major microfinance lender.
Recent Publications
(Click to View Recent Working Papers)
“The Ecological Footprint of Poverty Alleviation: Evidence from Mexico’s Oportunidades Program”, with Jennifer Alix-Garcia, Kate Sims, and Jarrod Welch. Forthcoming, Review of Economics and Statistics.
“Prompting Microfinance Borrowers to Save: A Field Experiment From Guatemala," with Jesse Atkinson, Alain de Janvry, and Elisabeth Sadoulet. Forthcoming, Economic Development and Cultural Change.
“Reputation in a Public Goods Game: Taking the Design of Credit Bureaus to the Lab,” with Steven Buck, Tomas Rosada, and Elisabeth Sadoulet. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, September 2012.
“Birth Rates and Border Crossings: Latin American Emigration to the US, Canada, Spain, and the UK” with Gordon Hanson. Economic Journal, June 2012.
“Impact of a Cash Transfer Program for Schooling on Prevalence of HIV and HSV-2 in Malawi: A Cluster Randomized Trial,” with Sarah Baird, Richard Garfein, and Berk Özler. Lancet, February 2012.
“Monitoring Repayment in Online Peer-to-Peer Lending," in Peter Gourevitch, David A. Lake, and Janice Stein, eds., Beyond Virtue: Evaluating the Credibility of Non-Governmental Organizations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012).
“Cash or Condition? Evidence from a Randomized Cash Transfer Program”, with Sarah Baird and Berk Ozler. Quarterly Journal of Economics (126), 2011.
“The Supply and Demand Side Impacts of Credit Market Information,” with Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet. Journal of Development Economics 93(2), 2010.
“The Demography of Mexican Migration to the United States,” with Gordon Hanson, American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, January 2009, 99:2, pp. 1-9.
“The Short-Term Impacts of a Schooling Conditional Cash Transfer Program on the Sexual Behavior of Young Women,” with Sarah Baird, Ephraim Chirwa, and Berk Özler. Forthcoming, Health Economics.
“Tracking the Introduction of the Village Phone Product in Rwanda,” with Michael Futch, Forthcoming, Information Technologies in International Development.
"Microfinance and Home Improvement: Using Retrospective Panel Data to Measure Program Effects on Fundamental Events," with Gonzalo Villaran and Bruce Wydick. Forthcoming, World Development.
"Using the Error in Pre-Election Polls to Test for the Presence of Pork," with Jacob Allen. The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy (Contributions), Vol. 9, Issue 1, 2009.
"The Great Mexican Emigration," with Gordon Hanson (NBER, Working Paper, 13675). Forthcoming, Review of Economics and Statistics.
“Estimating Treatment Effects from Spatial Policy Experiments: An Application to Ugandan Microfinance,” Review of Economics and Statistics, 7(06), February 2008.
“The Effectiveness of Listing under the U.S. Endangered Species Act: An Econometric Analysis Using Matching Methods,” with Paul Ferraro and Monica Ospina. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Vol. 54, 2007.
“Credit Information Systems in Less-Developed Countries: A Test with Microfinance in Guatemala,” with Jill Luoto and Bruce Wydick. January 2007, Economic Development and Cultural Change.
“How Rising Competition among Microfinance Institutions Affects Incumbent Lenders,” with Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet, The Economic Journal 115, October 2005, pp. 987-1004.
“Competition and Microfinance,” with Bruce Wydick, Journal of Development Economics 78, December 2005, pp. 271-298.
Recent Papers
(Click to View Recent Publications)
"Designing Experiments to Measure Spillover and Threshold Effects," with Sarah Baird, Aislinn Bohren, and Berk Ozler.
“Fair Trade and Free Entry: Can a Disequilibrium Market Serve as a Development Tool?,” with Elisabeth Sadoulet and Alain de Janvry.
“Designing Cost-Effective Conditional Cash Transfer Programs in Sub-Saharan Africa,” with Sarah Baird and Berk Özler.
“The Squeaky Wheels Get the Grease: Applications and Targeting in Tanzania’s TASAF,” with Sarah Baird and Berk Özler.
“What Do Credit Bureaus Do? Understanding Screening, Incentive, and Credit Expansion Effects,” with Bruce Wydick.
"Has Better Health Care Contributed to Higher HIV Prevalence in Sub-Saharan Africa?"
"Identifying Non-Linearities in Fixed Effects Models," with Wolfram Schlenker.
