This is from The Brookings Institution–(check the links to the conference papers below!)  The conference brought together a great group of micro and macroeconomists.

What Works in Development? Thinking Big and Thinking Small

Bill Easterly and Jessica Cohen of Brookings recently convened a conference with leading development experts to explore one of the most vexing issues of global development: what do we really know about what works and what doesn’t when fighting global poverty? The conference focused on the ongoing debate over which paths to development really maximize results: a big-picture approach focusing on the role of institutions, macroeconomic policies, growth strategies and other country-level factors; or a more grassroots approach focusing on particular microeconomic interventions such as conditional cash transfers, bed nets, teaching materials and other micro-level improvements in service delivery on the ground.

CONFERENCE PAPERS:

• The New Development Economics: We Shall Experiment, But How Shall We Learn?
  Author: Dani Rodrik (Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government)
  Discussants: Sendhil Mullainathan (Harvard University) & Martin Ravallion (World Bank)
• Breaking Out of the Pocket: Do Health Interventions Work? Which and in What Sense?
  Authors: Simon Johnson (International Monetary Fund) & Peter Boone (London School of Economics, Centre for Economic Performance)
  Discussants: Anne Case (Princeton University) & Jessica Cohen (Brookings Institution)
• Pricing and Access: Lessons from Randomized Evaluations in Education and Health
  Author: Michael Kremer (Harvard University and the Brookings Institution)
  Discussants: David Weil (Brown University) & Paul Romer (Stanford University)
• The Policy Irrelevance of the Economics of Education: Is ‘Normative as Positive’ Just Useless, or is it Worse?
  Author: Lant Pritchett (Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government)
  Discussants: Ben Olken (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) & Nancy Birdsall (Center for Global Development)
• High Bandwidth Economic Policies: Strategies To Speed Up Productive Transformation
  Author: Ricardo Haussman (Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government)
  Discussants: Nava Ashraf (Harvard University Business School) & Ross Levine (Brown University)
• Big Answers For Big Questions: The Illusions of Macroeconomics
  Author: Abhijit Banerjee (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
  Discussants: Peter Klenow (Stanford University) & William Easterly (NYU and Brookings Institution)