Charles Kenny

Books, Papers and Articles

Category: Q. Academic writing

  • A policy paper for CGD with Lee Robinson and Euan Ritchie who did nearly all of the work.  The UK has considerably increased the amount of aid it spends on research in recent years. The information associated with the majority of this research aid is vague, raising questions about transparency. A large amount of the…

  • A CGD Working Paper  examines the impact of Ukraine’s ambitious procurement reform on outcomes amongst a set of procurements that used competitive tendering. The ProZorro system placed all of the country’s government procurement online, introduced an auction approach as the default procurement method, and extended transparency. The reform was introduced with a dramatic increase in…

  • A note for CGD.  There is a lot we don’t know about what automation will mean for jobs in the future, including its impact (if any) on gender inequality. This note reviews evidence and forecasts on that question and makes four main points: (i) Past automation has been (broadly) positive for women’s average quality of…

  • A CGD Working Paper on policy coordination to help meet the SDGs.  TLDR: Important, but hard.   This paper discusses the role for policy integration to speed progress towards delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This is required because the goals set very ambitious targets for progress across a range of interlinked areas, encompassing both synergies…

  • Inside the Portfolio of the International Finance Corporation: Does IFC Do Enough in Low-Income Countries? with Jared Kalow and Vijaya Ramachandran is a CGD Policy Paper.   Between 2001 and 2016, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) committed $127 billion through 3,343 projects across the developing world. During this period, the bulk of IFC’s portfolio has moved lower middle-income countries to…

  • A working paper for CGD with Mallika Snyder.  The Sustainable Development Goals are an ambitious set of targets for global development progress by 2030 that were agreed by the United Nations in 2015. Amongst the 169 targets are a number that call for universal access, universal coverage, or universal eradication. These include ending extreme poverty and…

  • A CGD policy note with Tanvi Jaluka and Michael Brown on IMF Article IV negotiations since gender was declared 'macrocritical.' In short, there has been increased attention to the issue as reflected in word counts and discussion of women’s labor force participation, but there is still a long way to go.

  • Estimating the SDGs' Demand for Innovation is a CGD Working Paper written with Dev Patel.  How much innovation will be needed to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals? We model shifts in the cross-country relationship between GDP per capita and achievement in key development indicators as “technological gains” and convergence to the best performers at…

  • A paper by Dev Patel and me for CGD.  This analysis examines the relationship between legal reform and social norms surrounding homosexuality. We document three main findings. First, about a fifth of the variation in individual preferences can be explained at a country level. Second, using a difference-in-differences strategy, legalizing homosexuality improves how individuals view the…

  • Expanding and Measuring Opportunities is a working paper for the Center for Development and Enterprise.  The idea that circumstances and free choice can be neatly divided is open to considerable debate. The [equality of] opportunity framework begs the question, ‘what is in the control of the individual?’ Regardless, equality of opportunity is about ‘birth luck egalitarianism’-minimizing the…