Glossary

SECTORS (Website)
Entrepreneurship: The ability to develop and manage a business.
Finance Products: Tools that help one manage, save, and invest money.
Food Security: Having reliable and affordable access to a sufficient and nutritious food supply.
Infrastructure: Organizational structures, facilities, and systems which are needed for a society to function (e.g., roads, buildings)
Public Sector Management: Aspects of a society which are managed by national or local governments.
TOOLS
Commitment Devices: Provides some mechanism that helps people decide now what they must do in the future.
Community Mobilization: Relies on communities or other groups to self-enforce and self-enact changes in their behavior; gives beneficiaries more control over the intervention.
Conditional Cash Transfers (CCT): Transfers cash to people if they meet established conditions.
Conditional Transfers: Transfers money or aid to people if they meet established conditions.
Defaults: Makes a socially or personally desirable outcome the default choice so people are more likely to do it.
E-Products: An electronic product that is used in transactions or giving out information.
Framing: The way a concept is presented.
Institutional Rules: Who makes decisions, how they are made, and what these decisions are.
Price Variation: Offers goods or services at different prices. Usually done to estimate how demand for a commodity changes depending on its price.
Risk Aversion: Avoiding risks. In investing, this means accepting the lower rate of return but avoiding the higher level of risk.
Risk Reduction: Reduces the amount of risk people face in order to help them make more rational decisions.
Social Norms: Acceptable rules of behavior in a group or society.
Social Recognition: Publicly acknowledging a person or people for behaving in a certain way.
Subsidy: Some part of the cost of a good or service is covered by a third party.
Transaction Cost: Cost incurred in making an exchange of some sort in the economy.
Unconditional Transfers: Transfers money or aid to people that haven't met any sort of established standards or requirements.
STATISTICAL TERMS
Mean: The average number.
Standard Deviation: A measure of how spread out a set of numbers are. It measures how far away on average each number is from the mean.
Statistical Significance: A result is statistically significant if the reseracher is over 90% sure that the results obtained were not due to chance. In other words, the results indicate that the effect is explained by the cause.
SCHOLARLY RESEARCH TERMS
Abstract: A summary of the contents in an article.
Control Group (Comparison Group): The group in an experiment or study which receives no special treatment. This group is then compared to the group which does receive special treatment.
Encouragement Randomization: All sample participants have access to the treatment but some individuals or groups are randomly assigned to receive encouragement to get involved in the treatment program.
Experimental Group (Treatment Group): The group in an experiment or study which receives some sort of treatment or intervention. This group is then compared to the group which does not receive spcial treatment.
Lottery Around Cutoff Randomization: This procedure involves three groups:
  • those who will definitely be accepted into the treatment group
  • those who will not be accepted into the treatment group
  • and those who will have a random chance of being accepted into the treatment group.
Lottery Randomization: Units or participants in a study or experiment are randomly assigned to the treatment and control group. This is the default method of random assignment if not otherwise specified.
Phase-In Randomization: Everyone will be treated, but random selection will determine who is phased into the treatment first and who receives it later.
Random Assignment: The procedure for dividing the sample of participants into the treatment and control groups in a way that each participant has an equally likely chance of being in either kind of group.
Random Selection: The procedure for selecting members of a sample group (to be studied) by selecting participants at random so that every member of the population has an equally likely chance of being selected.
Rotation Randomization: Sample units or participants are randomly divided into two groups and the groups take turns receiving treatment.