- While the rest of us took August off blogging, Dave Evans blogged about how information can improve service delivery on Let’s Talk Development.
- There was a lot of discussion about gender and economics. Rebecca Thornton helpfully has put together a list of gender and economics links.
- Marc Bellemare has good advice on how to cite intelligently.
- As more and more papers rely on large admin datasets, there are questions about who gets to use this data and under what conditions. The 74 million has an interesting discussion about this in the context of school lottery data from Louisiana.
- On the data blog – a new LSMS guidebook for using non-standard units like local tins or bunches in measuring food and agricultural quantities.
- Nice twitter summary and powerpoint on how to write clearly by David Eli.
- 80,000 hours on whether it is fair to say most social programs don’t work – including this summary of U.S. evidence (it also discusses development evidence). I found this tidbit interesting: “Of 13,000 RCTs of new products/strategies conducted by Google and Microsoft, 80- 90% have reportedly found no significant effects.”
- In the New England Journal of Medicine, Tom Frieden discusses the use of evidence in medicine beyond RCTs, with examples of where other evaluation methods have led to important improvements in medical practice. Bud Wiederman offers a nice summary and discussion on the AAP journals blog.
- On Monkeycage, Michael Callen and co-authors on work they’ve done in Pakistan and India on trying to use why/how policymakers don’t use evidence more – including demonstrating serious constraints in the ability of civil servants to interpret evidence in the form of simple 2x2 tables or bar graphs.
- Want feedback on a new working paper – Marc Bellemare’s grad class will be doing practice referee reports and welcome suggestions of papers to include.
- Jonas Hjort in VoxDev on how the arrival of fast internet connections is linked with employment growth in Africa. And Dan Rogger on the lives and times of civil servants in the developing world.
- Opportunities for African students: 1) for African students and researchers to receive some funding for research projects with a focus on land as part of the AERC biannuals scheme; 2) for 2nd year PhD students enrolled in PhD in economics in African universities to attend a 5 week special course on land economics hosted by the University of Cape Town and organized in partnership with AERC
Join the Conversation