- Feeling bad about your latest rejection? Johannes Haushofer has bravely posted a CV of failures (inspired by this Naturejobs column) listing his papers that have been rejected, scholarships he was rejected for, PhD programs that turned him down, etc. - making the good point that failures are often invisible, while success is visible. Or just remind yourself that Akerlof’s Market for Lemons paper was rejected 3 times before it was published, and that many other classic papers in economics by Nobel laureates suffered similar fates.
- Nice summary in VoxEU of some of the lessons emerging from the Billion Prices project
- From 538, a discussion on basic incomes, including a cautionary tale about results on one outcome (that wasn’t the main one) driving policy decisions “While the purpose of the NIT pilots was to observe changes in work effort, an unrelated phenomenon caught the eye of critics: divorce. Controversy erupted when data from the Seattle and Denver studies seemed to show an increase in the divorce rate among participants (those findings were later discovered to be the result of a statistical error). The press spun wild stories, and the political credibility of NIT — and of basic income, for that matter — began to unravel.” And also how an economist with the delightful surname of Forget delved into data files on a forgotten Canadian program.
- Via Chris Blattman, a great interview with Card and Krueger about the origins of causal identification in economics
- From Marc Bellemare, a set of useful Stata cheatsheets
- Dupas and Miguel’s chapter for the handbook of field experiments – 107 pages (including 19 pages of references!) on the impacts and determinants of health levels in developing countries. Includes discussion of methodological issues as well as results, and this nice graph summarizing a lot of pricing demand studies for preventative health products:
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