- Congrats to Dave Donaldson for winning the Clark medal this year for his work at the intersection of international trade and development economics (although the economic historians are also claiming him) – here is the NYTimes summary – and here is a recent IGC piece by Dave and co-authors on the barriers to trade in Africa.
- Dave Evans discusses three further examples of studies that relate to the issue of scaling up RCTs on his personal blog – with a lively discussion on twitter under this thread and this one about what exactly you want to hold constant when thinking about whether the government can scale up a program run by NGOs. Keeping busy, he also blogs about his newly accepted paper on cash transfers and health outcomes in Tanzania, along with links to the data.
- Jeff Smith on the attitudes of program operators in the U.S. to random assignment in their programs “hostile attitudes to random assignment were deeply embedded and yielded not at all to any sort of rational argument…the random assignment requirement reinforced both their feelings that they had lost control as well as their resentment of the process”
- In Nature Communications, exercise is socially contagious- using weather shocks with presumably Strava data to show that if your friends in a different city run, you are more likely to as well. May be of interest to those who don’t care about exercise in terms of the discussion of complexity of using weather patterns that move across space (so today’s Boston weather is uncorrelated with today’s Chicago weather, but then Chicago’s weather today helps predict Boston’s in two days); and for social network analysis. Or the next time someone uses rainfall as an instrument for income shocks, you can just annoy the seminar by asking about whether they considered the exercise response… But the downside of social networks is seen in this week’s Hidden Brain podcast, which uses a natural experiment to show the causal impact of Facebook on making you compare yourself more to others and be less happy.
- Thanks for all the great feedback on how we can improve the blog and continue to make it useful. One request from readers was to make it easier to find stuff. We are pleased that the search window on the blog has now changed to restrict searches to World Bank blogs and use google search (unfortunately we can’t get it to restrict to searching Development Impact only). But it is still a big improvement – I tried out a search for “pre-analysis plan” and it came up with mostly reasonable and relevant hits. So try out the search window at the top of our main blog page and let us know what you think. Note though that one annoying thing is that if you want to do a second search after the results of the first, the search window on the results page reverts back to searching the entire World Bank -so go back to the blog main page to restrict search to blogs only.
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