· Essential reading this week: The Boston Review has an excellent feature on early interventions to promote social mobility, with the lead article by Jim Heckman. I never realized quite how small the samples of the famous early childhood studies are – treatment group of 58 kids in the Perry Preschool program and 65 in the control group.
· How foreigners affect survey responses on the CSAE blog – “We found that participants acted more generously – an average increase in giving of 20% – in villages where the white researcher was present.”
· Tim Harford discusses the results from “ one of the world’s largest ever randomized trials” involving almost 2 million people in a Community Driven Development program in the Democratic Republic of Congo – money made it where it was meant to go, but little in the way of development results to show for it seems to be the bottom line.
· Call for papers for Oxford’s CSAE annual Africa conference
· The Wall Street Journal India edition has a Q&A with our new chief economist, Kaushik Basu – main priorities for the World Bank are reaching out to people who live in chronic deprivation, “spreading amity”, and paying attention to how economics is fundamentally embedded in society and politics.
· The new Jobs Knowledge platform is now up in Beta mode. They have an “experiences from the field” section, and you can vote for our Jordan NOW project by clicking on rate this post at the end and choosing the number of stars. A number of other jobs experiments are also on the site.
· A new From Evidence to Policy note from the World Bank’s Human Development network discusses an evaluation of a public works and asset-building program on food security in Ethiopia.
· Speaker presentations from the IPA conference I blogged about on Monday are now up online at this link.
· The Guardian’s development network summarizes a Kenyan cash transfer study that finds a cash transfer program for orphans and vulnerable children reduces sexual activity among teens – I’m looking for Berk to give his take on the study in due course…
· Sample size jealousy: researchers ran an experiment on Facebook with 61 million people, every single adult in the U.S. who logged onto Facebook on election day 2010 took part in the experiment – which looked at whether seeing your Facebook Friends have voted causes you to be more likely to vote (yes).
Thanks to those who I (@dmckenzie001) follow on twitter for a number of these links.
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