Berk Ozler's blog

Yesterday, Markus blogged about a new initiative by 3ie to replicate studies in economics. It is indeed called “3ie’s Replication Program”. Below I argue that while this may be a worthy endeavor, it is mislabeled…

I made a temporary move recently, which left me without a dog walker for our two beloved (and very active) dogs, without a delivery option for good takeout food, and a need to build a fire in a wood stove every day. I had never spent this much time during weekdays walking the dogs, cooking, and carrying wood from the garage to build and maintain a fire throughout the day. Without the takeout food and all the hiking, I am healthier and somewhat less stressed, but the shift in time use takes some adjusting to…

After last week’s review of Mark Rosenzweig’s review of Poor Economics, I got asked, via email and comments, what I thought about Martin Ravallion’s review in the same issue of the Journal of Economic Literature. Last week’s post was motivated by an issue I had been thinking about for a while, i.e. the issue of small gains in absolute terms that are large in percentage terms. Once I read Rosenzweig’s piece, discussing this issue much more eloquently that I had been (in my head), it all clicked together with the debate on “small” vs.

Suppose that you’re told that a program reduced the rate of dropping out of school among 15 year-olds by 17% and this reduction was statistically significant. You are also told that the same figure among 12 year-olds is 38%. You would likely take note. Suppose now you’re told that these are the effects of a conditional cash transfer program, where the dropout rate among the control group is 37.7% and 16.8%, respectively for ages 15 and 12, thus the absolute effect sizes are 6.4 percentage points in each case.

Given that we are in a somewhat reflective mood this week due to the fact that it has been a year since we started this blog, I figured I’d highlight some of the comments that we received so far here and share some of my thoughts on these comments and related issues that have been on my mind recently as potential posts…

One of the comments we received was not to change too much and this sounds about right to me. This is not a blog that has a huge following by any means – we’re a niche blog – and we just have not seen or heard anything to suggest making substantial changes. We’ll keep trying to post everyday, which does take discipline, try to maintain a standard that we hope we established, encourage more guest posts, but all in all it is probably reasonable to expect more of the same in the upcoming months.

There is a minor buzz this week in Twitter and the development economics blogosphere about a paper (posted on the CSAE 2012 Conference website) that discusses a double blind experiment of providing different seeds of cowpeas to farmers in Tanzania. The paper has drawn “wows” and “yikes” and “!”, and I am hoping they are for the double blind development economics experiment and not for the findings.

An important, and stressful, part of the job when conducting studies in the field is managing the number of things that do not go according to plan. Markus, in his series of field notes, has written about these (see, for example, here and here) roller coaster rides we call impact evaluations. I have a post waiting to discuss the burnout that people involved in these studies are increasingly feeling these days, but today I want to talk about what went wrong in one of my projects recently and how we’re planning to deal with it.

·         Global poverty numbers for 2005-2008 are out. Many of you may not have known this, but the four of us who maintain this blog work in the same research group at the World Bank that is responsible for producing these numbers. The main highlight is that the percentage living below $1.25 a day and the number of people fell in all six regions for the period 2005-2008. This is the first time this has happened over three-yearly intervals since 1981. The improvement is not just in percentage terms: there were less people living in extreme poverty in 2008 (1.3 billion) compared to almost 2 billion in 1981.