Do schooling effects of cash transfer programs vary by poverty levels? It depends…
Having stumbled upon this development economics symposium, which took place in DC on Saturday, this paper
Malawi
Notes from the field: Setting up a firm survey in Malawi
I am currently in Malawi rolling out a firm survey with my colleagues Francisco Campos and Manuela Bucciarelli. As we’ve gone through the enumerator selection and training this week and a pre-test of the survey, a number of observations have come up – some related to firm surveys in particular, some more general. In no particular order:
Better Nutrition Through Information
In honor of Labor Day here in the US, I want to talk about a recent nutrition paper by Emla Fitzsimons, Bansi Malde, Alice Mesnard and Marcos Vera-Hernandez. This paper, “Household Responses to Information on Child Nutrition,” is one with a twist – they look not only at nutrition outcomes, but they also try and figure out where these might be coming from – and hence also look at labor supply.
Health effects of non-health programs
The previous post in this blog discussed the positive dynamic effects of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs in Mexico and Nicaragua – in particular on asset accumulation and the incidence of entrepreneurship by the rural poor.
The stressful condition
I came across this piece by Mullainathan and Datta in the Annual Report of the William Kellogg Foundation (HT Marginal Revolution), which is a behavioral economist’s take on the reasons why some parents are less likely than other
Schools is Good: A Reply to Lant Pritchett
Lant Pritchett once said to me “Thanks for the comments. As usual they are all very smart and well-informed and I disagree with most.” I feel similarly regarding his very popular piece posted here last week (already one of the top 10 most popular posts in our blog's short history) on how CCTs are forcing children in developing countries into terrible schools. So, here goes a reply…
Dear Lant,
Cash Transfers: What have we learned so far? What are the implications for policy? What more do we need to know?
Tomorrow and on Tuesday (October 24-25), there is a workshop at the World Bank titled “CCTs: The Second Generation of Evaluations.” If you are at the World Bank or in the DC area, you may want to make your way to this event, as it promises to be a good one – focusing on research conducted on the topic in the past three years or so.
Guest Post by Ken Leonard: Gender and Biological Differences between the Sexes
Women are less likely to occupy the top paying jobs in developed economies, in part because they are less competitive than men. A whole series of laboratory experiments has detailed the gap in competitiveness between the average woman and the average man, even when women are just as good, if not better than men. Is this result due to the fact that women are biologically female, or the fact that they are socialized as female? Although we often alternate between gender and sex in describing males and females, they are not strictly the same.
Hurting People while Trying to Help?
A piece in this week’s Nature reports that a large vaccine trial for HPV, which can cause cervical cancer, is in trouble in India due to serious violations of ethical rules and informed consent.
What happens when people refuse to update their beliefs?
Last week I wrote about “treatment as prevention.” Because being treated by a combination of ARV drugs effectively prevents the transmission of HIV from an infected person to his (her) uninfected partner, the idea is that if we were to test as many people as possible, find out who is infected, and offer them ARVs, we could make significant headway in preventing the spread of HIV. In other words, test and treat.