· In Nature, the push-back from scientists against Galor and Ashraf’s forthcoming AER paper on the impact of genetic diversity on per-capita incomes.
· On the IPA blog, David Yanagizawa-Drott discusses his work on trying to remove fake drugs from markets through competition.
· On the Development Policy blog, a young person’s guide to getting started in a career in development. It is written for Australians, but the general advice is pretty applicable to many other countries.
· Interview with Dean Karlan on YouPhil.com discusses insights from behavioral economics, and when NGOs should do evaluation.
· From Poverty to Power discusses Oxfam’s efforts to evaluate a random sample of its portfolio using “relatively rigorous methods by NGO standards”. This seems to consist in many cases of a single round survey after the intervention and propensity-score matching and multivariate regression.
· From Science blog - New evidence on the classic marshmallow experiment- Children who experienced reliable interactions immediately before the marshmallow task waited on average four times longer—12 versus three minutes—than youngsters in similar but unreliable situations. N=28 pre-school kids – basic point is if the kids don’t trust the second marshmallow will appear, they have no reason to wait - so rather than measuring self-control, the experiment might just measure how stable your environment is.
· Most awesome systematic review summary ever: “The primary aim of this systematic review was to identify and synthesize evidence of the impact of separate toilets for girls on their enrolment and attendance in schools. The authors did not identify any studies that were designed to assess the impact of separate-sex toilets. Thus, with an absence of studies in this area, there is evidence neither for nor against the impact of separate toilets for girls on their educational outcomes.”
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