· Video and slides from the first three DEC virtual seminars on COVID-19, including yesterday’s seminar on policies to help small and informal firms during this pandemic, and details of upcoming seminars.
· Virtual economics – a new website trying to share all the online seminars, conferences, etc. going on
· On VoxDev, do improved cookstoves inevitably go up in smoke? In Senegal, people used the stoves until they wore out (4-5 years), but then didn’t replace them – with affordability a major issue, although willingness to pay was about 70% of market prices, so partial subsidies did get them to start using again.
· Also on VoxDev, Banerjee and Sequeira summarize their work in South Africa giving transport subsidies to job-seekers – they suggest job seekers are too over-optimistic about what sort of job they could get in the city center, and learning about this through subsidies helps them correct these beliefs and be more likely to accept a job in their own township.
· SIEF’s latest From Evidence to Policy note looks at automated chlorination as a means of reducing child diarrhea in urban Bangladesh – and also provides an example of a double-blind trial – “The research team installed the chlorine dispensers in storage tanks connected to manual handpumps in the treatment group, and installed the vitamin C dosers in the control group … neither the study field staff nor the participants knew which study group the communities were a part of”
· CEGA summarizes the papers presented virtually at PacDev 2020 and discusses how to move a major conference online in 5 days.
· On the 3ie Evidence Matters blog, Subha Mani and Bidisha Barooah argue that phone surveys in developing countries need an abundance of caution right now.
Join the Conversation