In his latest Letter from America in the Royal Economic Society’s newsletter, Angus Deaton says “your wolf is interfering with my t-value” (the title refers in part to regulations on hunting wolves in the American West) and talks about excessive regulation with NIH grants, and his concerns with the move towards trial registries:
A pre-analysis plan is a step-by-step plan setting out how a researcher will analyze data which is written in advance of them seeing this data (and ideally before collecting it in cases where the researcher is collecting the data). They are recently starting to become popular in the context of randomized experiments, with Casey et al. and Finkelstein et al.’s recent papers in the QJE both using them.
· If you want a taste of the wide range of exciting new research going on in development economics, the programs of the CSAE conference at Oxford and PACDEV conference at UC Davis are a good place to start.
