- Rachel Glennerster on how the “small questions” RCTs have been argued to offer have in fact helped provide a big answer in public health
- Planet Money put together a nice podcast about the Nigerian business plan competition I evaluated
- On VoxEU Stefano Dellavigna and Devin Pope summarize work comparing the relative effectiveness of different types of monetary and non-monetary incentives in inducing effort, and a goal effort to compare the results with what experts predict….with the most menial task imaginable “M-Turk participants… task for the subjects is to alternately press the "a" and "b" buttons on their keyboards as quickly as possible for ten minutes.”
- How to tell which websites are experimenting on you
- From Dave Evans: “Two resources on implementation and process evaluations, something I always hear is good but don't know how to do (one, and two)”
- Angus Deaton’s Nobel lecture in the latest AER: “I believe that the work has an underlying unity. It concerns well-being, what was once called welfare, and uses market and survey data to measure the behavior of individuals and groups and to make inferences about well-being. Often, little more than counting is involved, as in the estimation of the fraction of the population whose spending is below a cutoff, or the calculation of the fraction of newborn children who die before their first birthday. Measurement, even without understanding of mechanisms, can be of great importance in and of itself—policy change is frequently based on it—and is necessary if not sufficient for any reasoned assessment of policies, including the many that are advocated for the reduction of national or global poverty. We are wise to remember the importance of good data, and not to neglect the challenges that measurement continuously poses”
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