- The inaugural issue of Development Engineering is now out (all issues are open access!). I’m delighted that my paper on attempting to use RFID to track small firm sales is in this first issue, along with a paper on how to randomize better in sequential randomized trials, a paper that proposes a “system [which] leverages smartphones, cellular based sensors, and cloud storage and computing to lower the entry barrier to impact evaluation”, a paper on biomass stoves, and one on rural electrification. Note also this from the editor’s introduction “we see major benefits from publishing studies that find weak or no impacts. In global development, there should be no silent failures; there is inherent value in learning from interventions that fail to achieve their intended impacts.”
- Angus Deaton’s JAMA summary of the Chetty et al. work on income and mortality in the U.S.
- From the Brookings blog – the downside of all those good non-cognitive skills – “some forms of childhood misbehavior, known by developmental psychologists as “externalizing behaviors,” and manifesting as aggression, hyperactivity or hostility, are indeed bad for schooling. However, they are also valued in the labor market, predicting higher wages… some of the “character skills” underlying misbehavior, despite their negative effect on schooling, can be quite valuable in other domains.”
- How to get tenure (if you’re a woman) – good advice in Foreign Policy that is directed at Political Scientists but also useful for economists (and for men).
- On the People, Spaces, Deliberation blog, Urmy Shukla and Heather Lanthorn make a plea for more in-depth reporting of the implementation processes and contextual details behind typical impact evaluations.
- A useful guide to power calculations by McConnell and Vera-Hernández includes Stata code for doing simulations, discussion of adjusting power calculations for multiple testing, and more. It doesn’t consider the number of time periods as a choice parameter though.
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