· Reminder: submissions for the BREAD conference on Development in Africa to be held at the World Bank in Match are due November 15th. Details are here.
Index-based rainfall insurance offers the potential to allow farmers to protect themselves against one of the most important risks they face – the risk of drought (or conversely too much rain).
· The IDB Development that Works blog discusses an evaluation of an online sexual health program in Colombia provided to adolescents in public schools, finding positive impacts on knowledge and behaviors.
The World Bank's blogs have recently come under an increasing number of spam comments, despite spam filters which already sometimes I struggle to get through! A new system will be up November 16th I've been told, so we should be able to more quickly approve comments after then. Until then:
- if you have a genuine comment, send us an email to let us know it is in there - or just email it to one of us and we are happy to post it for you.
- we will continue to never approve a spam comment, so stop wasting your and our time spammers.
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.
· Is business training for women’s subsistence businesses futile? I ask in a post on the All About Finance blog. I suggest we need an f(.) change. Also see my 2-page impact note.
As our impact evaluations broaden to consider more and more possible outcomes of economic interventions (an extreme example being the 334 unique outcome variables considered by Casey et al. in their CDD evaluation) and increasingly investigate the channels of impact through subgroup heterogeneity analysis, the issue of multiple hypothesis testing is gaining increasing prominence.
· Job Opening at the World Bank for an experienced Impact Evaluator: Manager of the DIME unit. “In view of the rapidly expanding IE work program and related human and budgetary resources managed by the DIME unit, Bank management has decided to establish the position of Manager, DIME unit”.
· In Nature, the push-back from scientists against Galor and Ashraf’s forthcoming AER paper on the impact of genetic diversity on per-capita incomes.
Christel Vermeersch, our World Bank colleague from the HD group, just sent us this request, which she asked us to share with our blog audience to see if you have any lessons to share:
Dear friends and colleagues,
