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David McKenzie's blog

Blog links November 7: Impact Evaluation Existential Angst, Our Innate Grasp of Probability, big data, and More…

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A Call for Innovative Ideas on SME Growth

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I wanted to alert our readers to a new competition for ideas of how to best foster Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) growth.  Typically with impact evaluation we end up evaluating a program that others have designed, or working with the occasional bank or NGO that is willing to try a new idea, but usually with firms that are very small in size.  What is missing is a space where people with innovative ideas can get them into the hands of governments designing SME programs. I am working with the new Trade and Competitiveness Global Practice at the World Bank to try to do something new here, to give researchers and operational staff with ideas the chance to get them to a stage where they can become part of World Bank projects, and thereby have the potential to be implemented at much larger scale on lots of SMEs.

Blog links October 31: Frightful ethics? Ghastly preferences, Spooky Stata help, and more…

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  • From the Stata blog: how to put the Stata user manuals on your ipad.
  • Chris Blattman discusses the controversy surrounding a field experiment being done by political scientists in the Montana election – much of the controversy seems very odd to a development economist –especially a concern that political scientists might actually be doing research that could affect politics….Dan Drezner notes the irony “political scientists appear to be damned if they do and damned if they don’t conduct experiments. In the absence of experimental methods, the standard criticism of political science is that it’s not really a science because of [INSERT YOUR PREJUDICE OF CHOICE AGAINST THE SOCIAL SCIENCES HERE]. The presence of experimental methods, however, threatens to send critics into a new and altogether more manic forms of “POLITICAL SCIENTISTS ARE PLAYING GOD!!” panic.”

A Technology Letdown: Efforts at using RFID technology to track microenterprise inventories

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Measuring microenterprise profits is hard. Most owners of these small firms keep no records and have very volatile incomes.  Asking firm owners what their profits are can lead to high refusal rates, noisy data, trouble with recall, and then there is the added concern that reporting may change with interventions  (either because an intervention like business training changes recording, or because people who get given finance may want you to think it has benefited them).

It’s Time Again for Submissions for our Annual Blog Your Job Market Paper Series

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We are pleased to launch for the fourth year a call for PhD students on the job market to blog their job market paper on the Development Impact blog.  We welcome blog posts on anything related to empirical development work, impact evaluation, or measurement. For examples, you can see posts from 2013 and 2012. We will follow the same process as previous years, which is as follows:
We will start accepting submissions immediately, with the goal of publishing them in November and early December when people are deciding who to interview. Below are the rules that you must follow, followed by some guidance/tips you should follow:
 

Testing different behavioral approaches to get people to attend business training

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A while back I blogged about work using active choice and enhanced active choice to get people to get flu shots and prescription refills. The basic idea here is that relatively small modifications to the way a choice is presented can have large impacts on the take-up of a program. This seemed useful in the context of many of our training programs– attendance rates averaged 65 percent in a review of business training programs I did with Chris Woodruff. Therefore for an ongoing evaluation of the GET AHEAD business training program in Kenya, we decided to test out this approach.
 

Weekly links October 17: how to do organizational change, extortion and schooling, what’s new in microfinance evidence, and more…

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Insuring small firms against big political and economic risks: an experiment in post-revolution Egypt

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The Arab Spring brought about a wave of joy in many countries in the Middle East and North Africa as repressive regimes that had ruled for years were overthrown. But the aftermath brought about considerable turmoil and uncertainty as to what was going to happen in many countries. In Egypt, the immediate aftermath of the January 2011 revolution which toppled Hosni Mubarak included closing the stock market for 55 days, curfews of up to 18 hours a day, and an interim government under the control of the Armed Forces.

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