- Leonard Wantchekon on the “curse of the good soil” and insufficient investment in rural infrastructure.
- From the Harvard Business Review: experiment with organizational change before going all in.
- Owen Ozier on deworming and child cognition in the long-run – particularly relevant after Berk’s post this week on the replication of the original Miguel and Kremer paper.
- Interesting piece on the challenges of attempted school reforms in India and Guinea-Bissau in the LSE Centrepiece: “With just four months until the schools were to open, our 48 candidate teachers arrived with demands that would … mean their wage rising to over four times those of the average teacher and more than the pay received by public sector doctors, as well as cabinet ministers….For the next six months, we watched as the 48 candidate teachers marched across Guinea-Bissau’s political map to try to extort a cash award from us….
- How did they calculate that “The Economic Impact of Ebola is $4-32billion” number you have heard? The team behind the number discuss on Let’s Talk Development.
- Banerjee, Karlan and Zinman on what we learn from the six RCTs on microfinance recently published in the AEJ applied….power is an issue “The individual studies may lack strong evidence for transformative effects on the average borrower, but they also lack strong evidence against transformative effects”…another interesting point is how many outcomes the studies look at: “studies also estimate treatment effects on a large variety and number of downstream outcomes (study mean number of downstream treatment effects estimated = 50, min = 36, max = 82)….Encouraging also to read that longer-term follow-ups are being done “two longer-run follow-ups to the experiments in this volume are in the works: the India team conducted surveys 7 years post-random assignment, and the Morocco team is in the field for another follow-up survey, 8 year post-random assignment.”
- On the CSAE blog – a recap/summary of work that I think we have previously mentioned, which involved showing a video to youth in rural Ethiopia to change aspirations, with surprisingly positive results : although follow-up is only 6 months, and the increase in savings, while large in percentage terms relative to the control mean, is less than $5.
- A survey of methods for eliciting beliefs about probabilities, and the trade-offs involved and issues when incentivizing respondents (ungated version)
- Learning about what variables you need for selection on observables to be a reasonable assumption – from EconJeff.
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