States. They are employing a semi-structured open-ended protocol that covers domains that include lifehistories, social and familial relationships, and economic hardship. They plan to use a mix of traditional qualitative methods and NLP to analyze the large-N qualitative data.

# D. <u>Studying Process</u>

Empirical economics, particularly after the credibility revolution, seems almost singularly focused on outcomes. Mechanisms are generally relegated to ex-post theory, rather than careful observation of the process by which change happens. Ethnography, participant-observation, open-ended qualitative interviews, are eminently suited to filling this gap, to understanding “how”, as well “how much” (White 2008, Bamberger, Rao and Woolcock 2010). Yet, despite the increased of qualitative methods in randomized trials and experiments in adjacent disciplines such as psychology (Paluck 2010), they have not yet taken hold in economics. I will briefly review three studies that integrate serious ethnography with quantitative impact evaluations to demonstrate the added value of incorporating an element of reflexivity into causal inference and demonstrate that it can help both in improving scientific understanding and in informing policy-making.

Harkening back to Elijah Anderson’s ethnography of Philadelphia, a team of public health researchers and ethnographers collaborated on a mixed-methods study to find ways of dealing with urban “blight” in poorer areas of the city (Branas et al 2018). An ethnography of a poor “micro-neighborhood” in the city found it “visibly impacted” by drug trafficking and gun violence. Overgrown vacant lots were centers of drug dealing and violent activity and were used to store drugs and guns. Virtually all the residents interviewed in this neighborhood, in comparison with a better-off neighborhood, were very supportive of an intervention to clean up and “green” vacant lots. The team designed an intervention which cleaned vacant lots, planted new grass and trees, and installed fencing. 541 vacant lots were randomly chosen from poor neighborhoods in the city, and then randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. After a 38-month period, they found that areas around the treated lots saw a statistically significant 36% drop in perceptions of crime, and a 76% increase in the use of these vacant lots for social activities. Overall crime dropped by 13% and gun violence by 29%. In this study, ethnography was used less to track the process of change, and more to understand community needs to design an effective intervention to address urban blight and associated gun violence and crime.

Blattman et al’s (2021) recent paper also studies drug-ridden neighbourhoods in the city of Medellin in Colombia which has long had a reputation of being at the centre of Colombia’s drug economy. The research team, which combined economists and ethnographers, spent four years conducting open-ended interviews with dozens of gang leaders, managers, and foot soldiers in thirty gangs asking questions about their 30 gangs on their organization, operations, and rule. They also interviewed several experts, police, prosecutors, and community leaders. Drawing on their field work they designed a quantitative survey on the services provided by drug gangs in neighborhoods, tax collection, extortion, and the extent to which these were perceived as legitimate by the community. They used a natural experiment where the city was reorganized into 16 wards called _communas_ in 1987 _._ Streets on either side of a _communa_ border were very similar, but for the three decades since the reorganization were located at different distances from the police and administrative headquarters of the neighboring _communas._ Quantitative data were collected from 7,000 respondents and 223 low- and middle-income neighborhoods. The qualitative and quantitative data provide revealing insights into the workings of the drug economy. Gangs did not provide public goods, the government does, but gangs provide excludable goods such as security services, informal contract enforcement, and dispute resolution which complement the services that governments provide. Consistent with this, the quantitative data show that the services provided by drug gangs tend to be more frequently closer to _communa_ headquarters. Blattman et al thus challenge the received wisdom that organized crime “fills a vacuum left by weak states” but argue instead “criminal governance can also be a strategic response to strong state presence.” 15