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Jed Friedman's blog

When to use insiders or outsiders as survey interviewers

Submitted by Jed Friedman on Wed, 2012-05-23 08:54

Researchers have long recognized the importance of choosing interviewer characteristics while designing their fieldwork – for example female interviewers are often utilized to explore topics related to domestic violence and respondents of both sexes are more likely to disclose sexual abuse to female interviewers than to male ones.  Another key consideration is the degree of familiarity between interviewer and respondent, but here the decision appears to be obvious. It is an accepted norm in fieldwork that survey interviewers should be strangers with no pre-existing relationship to the respondent. There is virtually no deviation from this norm in practice.

The Copenhagen Consensus 2012: reflections on impact evaluation’s role in the tyranny of the known

Submitted by Jed Friedman on Wed, 2012-05-16 09:25

Very recently, the results of the third global Copenhagen Consensus were released. This is a semi-regular event self-billed as an effort to put together “the world’s smartest minds to analyze the costs and benefits of different approaches to tackling the world’s biggest problems”. This year’s consensus exercise seeks to determine the best ways of advancing welfare by “supposing that an additional $75 billion of resources were at [the experts’] disposal over a 4-year period”. Review papers were commissioned in domains such as infectious disease, education, water and sanitation, and climate change. The direct intent of these papers is to inform an expert panel of 4 Nobel laureates in economics (plus one more notable economist) who issued a prioritized list of interventions over which to allocate the funds.

A new global data network on population and environment

Submitted by Jed Friedman on Wed, 2012-05-09 09:46

Co-authors and I are soon to complete (fingers crossed) some new work on climatic shocks and neo-natal mortality. But our findings are not the topic of this post. Rather I want to discuss the necessary behind-the-scenes data construction work that had to take place before the first regression could be estimated. The work involved the aggregation of fifty plus national level microdata sets (from Demographic and Health Surveys) and then a merger with geo-coded historical weather data (from NOAA). While doing this painstaking work, it struck me that there has to be a better way – our team was surely are not the first to do an exercise of this type and unfortunately we won’t be the last. Indeed similar basic data infrastructures have been replicated several times before. But how many times must the wheel be reinvented?

An incrementalist view of Impact Evaluation and knowledge

Submitted by Jed Friedman on Wed, 2012-05-02 09:27

 


Some years back I received rather bemusing comments from an anonymous referee regarding a journal submission. He or she wrote: “This study doesn’t constitute an economics paper but is simply one large calculation”. Suffice to say, I didn’t agree. However the implied sentiment – i.e. only work that contains behavioral models grounded in economic theory, embodied in at least one line of offset mathematical text, constitutes real economic work – is a common one. I was reminded of this sentiment as I read through a recent article in the American Economic Review, one of our flagship journals. The aforementioned article presents an environmental accounting framework for air pollution impacts in the United States and, yes, it is one very large calculation.

CCTs usually increase schooling but few studies have found gains in test scores – what’s behind this disconnect?

Submitted by Jed Friedman on Wed, 2012-04-11 09:28

The majority of CCT programs with schooling conditions have been found to increase enrollment rates and attendance. Far fewer of the evaluations, however, report results on learning outcomes. Those that do typically find no gains in learning, at least as assessed by test scores. The 2009 CCT review report by Fiszbein, Schady, and others summarizes four studies that measure CCT impacts on learning outcomes. The first two use school-based testing data and find no impact on test scores. Since in-school test data are subject to various selection biases, two other studies rely on home testing of students but these studies also find no impact of the CCT program on learning outcomes.

Development Impact turns one – tell us what year two should look like

Submitted by Jed Friedman, co-authors: David McKenzie, Berk Ozler, Markus Goldstein on Tue, 2012-04-03 09:14


As we celebrate our first year of the Development Impact blog, we thought it would be a good time to take stock and see what our readers would like in our second year. We’ve already done our survey work and RCT, so now its time for direct, self-selected, feedback from you, the reader.  We want to know:

·         What sorts of posts do you want to see more or less of?

Behind lunch choice and moral decisions: the link between attention and behavior

Submitted by Jed Friedman on Wed, 2012-03-28 09:10

Walking to the office earlier this week, I stepped right into oncoming traffic while engrossed in a conversation on the mobile phone. Usually quite mindful of my surroundings, at that point I was so preoccupied that the rules of basic traffic safety were nowhere my mind. By a funny coincidence I arrived at the office and started reading an academic paper with the attention-grabbing title “God is Watching You”.

Economy, conflict, and rain revisited

Submitted by Jed Friedman on Wed, 2012-03-21 09:04

A few weeks ago David linked to a paper. I meant to read it, but forgot until my enterprising colleague at RAND, Sebastian Bauhoff, reminded me. This work in progress, by Heather Sarsons, calls to light the assumptions behind a number of analytic studies that use rainfall as an instrument to estimate the causal relationship between economic variables and conflict and/or civil disturbance. I’ll get to Sarsons paper in a second but first some background.

Psychological recovery after disaster – resilience is the norm

Submitted by Jed Friedman on Wed, 2012-03-14 09:18

I’ve been reading a good bit on psychological responses to conflict and disaster for on-going work and am struck by the tone of discussion in the popular press soon after a potentially traumatic event. In these reports, trauma among the survivors is often presumed widespread and the focus is on its expected costs and consequences. However more recent academic work on this topic argues that an exclusive focus on the traumatized misses most of the story.

Do local development projects during civil conflict increase or decrease violence?

Submitted by Jed Friedman on Thu, 2012-03-08 09:45

A “hearts and minds” model of conflict posits that development aid, by bringing tangible benefits, will increase population support for the government. This increased support in turn can lead to a decrease in violence, partly through a rise in population cooperation and information sharing with the government. At least one previous observational study in Iraq found that development aid is indeed associated with a decrease in conflict. A very recent working paper approaches the same question through an evaluation of community development programs in the Philippines and explores whether these local aid activities increase or decrease insurgent violence. Interestingly, the study identifies a significant increase in violence during the implementation period of the aid program.