- On the CGD blog, Lant Pritchett offers his 4-part smell test for whether your impact evaluation is asking a question that matters.
- On the Monkey Cage blog, Macartan Humphreys on how to make field experiments (in politics) more ethical – very useful discussion, although his suggestion that one solution is that researchers should try to avoid doing the intervention themselves seems to me debatable – I think it deals with the paperwork concerns and deflects blame, but creates this dichotomy between researchers subject to ethical constraints and others who are not.
- Jason Kerwin on a few highlights from the NEUDC conference.
- What to do if you are accused of p-hacking from the BITSS blog.
- From the IDB blog, positive impacts from a program teaching English to Spanish speakers
- From Nature News: evidence that humans have an innate grasp of probability – good news for all of you planning risk aversion or subjective probability questions
- In Science, Liran Einav and Jon Levin have a review of the use of big data in economics. Interesting to see that now nearly half of the papers published in the AER get an exception from the data availability policy!
- Heather Lanthorn offers thoughts on the extent to which pre-analysis is possible for qualitative work….”my hunch is that part of why people think planning for analysis of qualitative work may difficult is because, often, people don’t plan to ‘analyze’ qualitative data. instead, perhaps, the extent of the plan is to collect data. and then they plan to find a good quote or story (“anecdata”) — which may raise some questions about whether social science research is being done”…working with and asking questions of living people implies an ethics-review process, for which the research will have to lay out at least the ‘domains’ (aka themes, topics, categories) of information s/he hopes to observe and ask people about. Usually, one does not get away with saying “I am just going to head over here, hang out, and see what I find.”
- Reminder: we are still taking submissions for our blog your job market series – we will start posting these either next week or the week after.
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