- Surveying Cubans under the Castro regime from Monkeycage: “How do you conduct a reliable public opinion poll in a closely monitored society where political dissent is strictly repressed?... Interviewers recorded responses with handheld electronic devices. The responses then were downloaded to laptops and delivered to a server outside the country. Data was tabulated by B&A, and original responses on devices were deleted.”
- Michael Clemens has a new paper trying to clarify what replication is
- Youtube videos of Oriana Bandiera’s DIME workshop talk on designing public sector interventions, Cyrus Samii’s talk on Power Calculations: What and How in the Public Sector and Imran Rasul’s talk on Measurement Issues in Public Sector Impact Evaluations and slides/materials all here (h/t Dave Evans).
- Rachel Glennerster on what researchers can do to foster good relationships with implementing partners
- Gary King lecture slides on matching for causal inference : or why you shouldn’t use propensity score matching but use other matching approaches instead
- A Ted talk on economics experiments with monkeys (h/t Emanuela Galasso)
- The World Bank’s Trade and Competitiveness Global Practice lecture series now has the different speakers’ webstreams archived online. E.g. Chad Syverson on what determines productivity?
- Dave Evans and Anna Popova have made available the list of education studies (with hyperlinks for most) – drawn from the six reviews that they reviewed in their recent post (and paper) plus one new review – here.
- Tim Taylor covers highlights from a Federal Reserve of Richmond interview with Dani Rodrik – includes his thoughts on where development economics has gone wrong over time, policy-making in a second best world, and more. “I think it's a classic case of mistaking a model for the model….If you ask most economists, "What kind of a science is economics?," they will give a response that approximates natural sciences like physics, which is that we develop hypotheses and then we test them, we throw away those that are rejected, we keep those that cannot be rejected, and then we refine our hypotheses and move in their direction.This is not how economics works — with newer and better models succeeding models that are older and worse in the sense of being empirically less relevant. The way we actually increase our understanding of the world is by expanding our collection of models. We don't throw out models, we add to them; the library of models expands..”
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