{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,9,25]],"date-time":"2025-09-25T14:40:12Z","timestamp":1758811212588,"version":"3.44.0"},"reference-count":41,"publisher":"The Econometric Society","issue":"5","funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/100004421","name":"World Bank Group","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","id":[{"id":"10.13039\/100004421","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["ECTA"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Policymakers often test expensive new programs on relatively small samples. Formally incorporating informative Bayesian priors into impact evaluation offers the promise to learn more from these experiments. We evaluate a Colombian program for 200 firms which aimed to increase exporting. Priors were elicited from academics, policymakers, and firms. Contrary to these priors, frequentist estimation cannot reject null effects in 2019, and finds some negative impacts in 2020. For binary outcomes like whether firms export, frequentist estimates are relatively precise, and Bayesian posterior intervals update to overlap almost completely with standard confidence intervals. For outcomes like increasing export variety, where the priors align with the data, the value of these priors is seen in posterior intervals that are considerably narrower than the confidence intervals. Finally, for noisy outcomes like export value, posterior intervals show almost no updating from priors, highlighting how uninformative the data are about such outcomes. Future policy experiments could use these posteriors as priors in a Bayesian or empirical Bayesian analysis.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3982\/ecta21567","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2025,9,12]],"date-time":"2025-09-12T08:58:58Z","timestamp":1757667538000},"page":"1915-1935","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":2,"title":["Bayesian Impact Evaluation With Informative Priors: An Application to a Colombian Management and Export Improvement Program"],"prefix":"10.3982","volume":"93","author":[{"given":"Leonardo","family":"Iacovone","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"The World Bank"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"David","family":"McKenzie","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Development Research Group, The World Bank"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Rachael","family":"Meager","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Economics, University of New South Wales"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"2359","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2025]]},"reference":[{"key":"ecta200812-bib-0001","first-page":"193","volume":"2","author":"Abadie","year":"2020","journal-title":"American Economic Review: Insights"},{"unstructured":"Abadie, Alberto, Anish Agarwal, Guido Imbens, Siwei Jia, James McQueen, and Serguie Stepaniants (2023): \u201cEstimating the Value of Evidence-Based Decision Making,\u201d arXiv:2306.13681. arXiv preprint.","key":"ecta200812-bib-0002"},{"key":"ecta200812-bib-0003","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"2117","DOI":"10.3982\/ECTA18155","volume":"89","author":"Andrews","year":"2021","journal-title":"Econometrica"},{"doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Athey, Susan, Raj Chetty, Guido Imbens, and Hyunseung Kang (2019): \u201cThe Surrogate Index: Combining Short-Term Proxies to Estimate Long-Term Treatment Effects More Rapidly and Precisely,\u201d NBER Working Paper.","key":"ecta200812-bib-0004","DOI":"10.3386\/w26463"},{"key":"ecta200812-bib-0005","volume":"18","author":"Azzolina","year":"2021","journal-title":"International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health"},{"key":"ecta200812-bib-0006","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"27","DOI":"10.1038\/nrd1927","volume":"5","author":"Berry","year":"2006","journal-title":"Nature reviews Drug discovery"},{"key":"ecta200812-bib-0007","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1","DOI":"10.1093\/qje\/qjs044","volume":"128","author":"Bloom","year":"2013","journal-title":"Quarterly Journal of Economics"},{"doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Bloom, Nicholas, Raffaela Sadun, and John Van Reenen (2016): \u201cManagement as a Technology,\u201d Stanford Working Paper.","key":"ecta200812-bib-0008","DOI":"10.3386\/w22327"},{"key":"ecta200812-bib-0009","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"635","DOI":"10.1086\/696154","volume":"126","author":"Bruhn","year":"2018","journal-title":"Journal of Political Economy"},{"unstructured":"Chung, Yeojin, Sophia Rabe-Hesketh, Andrew Gelman, Jingchen Liu, and Vincent Dorie (2012): \u201cAvoiding Boundary Estimates in Linear Mixed Models Through Weakly Informative Priors,\u201d U.C. 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