- On Quora, Stanford Professor Jon Levin answers questions about economics. Both graduate students and young faculty might be interested in his response to “did you ever feel like economics was not for you even though you enjoy it”: “after I finished my graduate classes,I went through a period where I was trying to find an idea for my job market paper and getting nowhere. I was working every minute but at the end of every day I'd pretty much throw out all my notes. Research can be incredibly frustrating when you are getting nowhere.”
- Lessons learned from year one of the White House’s Social and Behavioral Sciences team
- Another chapter in the forthcoming Handbook of Experiments: Roland Fryer on the production of human capital in developed countries: evidence from 196 field experiments
- Sinister virus: Nature.com reports that HIV is able to speedily mutate to overcome CRISPR attacks against it. Worse: "And the very act of (gene-)editing — involving snipping at the virus’s genome — may introduce mutations that help it to resist attack." Discouraging news, exciting discovery, and it doesn't seem like the researchers will give up this line of attack just yet...
- On VoxEU, Ingvild Almas and co-authors discuss how conventional survey measures don’t show any effect of a CCT on empowerment in Macedonia, but a lab-based measure does: The woman reveals how much she is willing to pay to receive a transfer instead of her husband receiving it. On average the women are willing to pay around 20% of the offered transfer in order to gain control over resources – and women living in municipalities where CCT payments were offered exclusively to women were willing to pay less to get control of the transfer in the lab experiment.
- Funding opportunity: IPA’s Financial inclusion program has a call for expressions of interest for work on financial product innovations for low-income households in developing countries.
- Call for Papers: 10 years after the World Development Report on Equity and Development, a time when talking about inequality was not as "in" as it has been recently, we're revisiting the topic with a conference. You can submit your papers now. Confirmed participants include Banerjee, Lustig, Milanovic, Ravallion, and Robinson.
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