Published on Development Impact

Friday links June 7: Unconditional cash transfer results from India, horror stories of implementation, funding, and more…

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  • Call for papers – NEUDC conference November 2-3 at Harvard. This is a fun conference which allows you to see lots of new work in development .
  • Funding: Call for expressions of interest – the World Bank Gender Innovation Lab is looking for teams and projects to work on impact evaluations on programs that aim to increase women’s, or men and women’s, agricultural productivity, entrepreneurship, employment, and economic voice and empowerment in sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Marc Bellemare provides a response you can give to the next referee who complains you are using a linear model instead of probit or logit –  although I’m not sure referees would like being told this complaint makes them an old fogey - “Ultimately, I think the preference for one or the other is largely generational, with people who went to graduate school prior to the Credibility Revolution preferring the probit or logit to the LPM, and with people who went to graduate school during or after the Credibility Revolution preferring the LPM”.
  • The challenges/horror stories of implementing experiments are discussed on the 3ie blog: a randomized roll-out where a local partner boasted of attaining near universal coverage; a survey firm that says “Tell us what you expect to see in the data, and we’ll show it to you.”, and more…
  • The impact of the Techo emergency housing program in Uruguay, Mexico and El Salvador is discussed on the IDB development that works blog.
  • The Times of India reports on new results from a unconditional cash transfer experiment in India: “households receiving cash transfers were able to spend more on schooling, visit doctors more often - especially for women - and diversify their diets. There was no increase in spending on "private bads" like alcohol” and the government response “"All this experiment proves is that when you give money to the poor, they spend it well. But the government does not have money for existing schemes, let alone to give cash to everyone on top of this,"

Authors

David McKenzie

Lead Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank

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