- Stephanie Schwartz asks “are research ethics a question of public opinion?” on the Political Violence at a glance blog - which discusses a new study that asked both research subjects and scholars their opinions on the acceptability of different research designs. Interesting discussion, particularly around what to do when the two differ – e.g. “A human rights advocate wants their interview with a researcher to be on the record. But the researcher worries that disclosing the subject’s name might put them in harm’s way. Does the researcher follow the participant’s understanding of “acceptable risk” and publish their name? Or do they follow their own instincts and keep the source anonymous?” (h/t This Week in Africa).
- On the Future Development blog, Ariel Benyishay and co-authors discuss how they used satellite data to evaluate a USAID rural roads project in Palestine – using a diff-in-diff approach they compare nightlight in 750 meter grid cells shortly before, during, and shortly after the roads were rehabilitated to those in not-yet-improved cells. The report has some discussion of the many challenges involved, such as how to interpret an increase in nightlights, dealing with cells which have multiple roads treated, and the problem of potential spatial reallocation of economic activity.
- At Quartz Africa, Dan Kopf has a nice piece on what’s next for business plan competitions, summarizing the evidence from my Nigeria work, and then discussing a trial in progress in Kenya.
- The Economist takes steps towards Open Data, publishing data and scripts for the Big Mac index in Github.
- On the Declare Design blog, what to do if there is treatment heterogeneity and the probability of assignment varies by strata/block?
- What’s the latest evidence on teachers? David Evans’ has a round-up of 10 recent papers, including several evaluations.
- The Midwest International Economic Development Conference is accepting submissions. The conference is on April 26-27, 2019, in Madison, Wisconsin (USA). Submission deadline is January 11, 2019.
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