· GiveWell has a nuanced discussion of the evidence for giving cash directly to poor households and how this compares to deworming and ant-malaria bednets as interventions they recommend charitable donors should support.
Several countries around the world (notably Australia and Canada) have migration points systems- score above some points threshold and you can come in, score below and you can’t. This has intrigued me with the possibility of a regression-discontinuity design to measure impacts of migrating. However, there are several problems – the points given tend to be lumpy (e.g.
· Nice op-ed in the Washington Post by reporter Dylan Matthews calling for more testing of policy experiments
· Givewell’s blog has an extended discussion revisiting the case for economic benefits of deworming.
In clustered randomized experiments, random assignment occurs at the group level, with multiple units observed within each group. For example, education interventions might be assigned at the school level, with outcomes measured at the student level, or microfinance interventions might be assigned at the savings group level, with outcomes measured for individual clients.
· Jon Baron discusses the need to move towards evidence-based funding on the NY Times Economix blog including some cases where this has been done in the U.S. context.
We are pleased that the Bank has installed new spam-filtering software and so comments are now working again on the blog.
One of those stories going the rounds about a month ago concerns a blogger in San Francisco, who worried he was wasting too much time on Facebook and Reddit. As he writes on his blog, he used a software app which tracked what he was doing with his time and found almost 19 hours a week went to these activities.
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:
