- Chris Blattman provides an incentive to delay giving up on that great research idea you’ve been peddling for years in this story from the EconTalk podcast: For years, he pitched random African factory owners the idea of an RCT of factory employment. “They’d usually look at me kind of funny. They wouldn’t leap at the possibility. I was just this person they met on a plane.” One day it worked, and six weeks later he was randomizing applicants.
- Palermo and Glassman lay out a cautionary tale of how authors of systematic reviews can get overambitious in their policy recommendations, as authors did when jumping from a synthesis of cash transfers and contraception to an unwarranted recommendation of “a strict conditionality of cash transfers for having no more than two children.”
- Zhang highlights the “surprising link between China’s one-child policy and rising house prices” in a post based on his recent paper: “The sex ratio imbalance explained between half and one-third of the increase in housing prices in 25 major cities between 2003 and 2009.”
- Do you think your field experiment is totally original? You’re probably wrong. On the Ufahamu Africa podcast, Melissa Graboyes discusses her book The Experiment Must Continue: Medical Research and Ethics in East Africa, 1940-2014 and the a-historical nature of global health work, with people remembering only other work from the very recent past. She also discusses how current practice in getting consent may not actually be informed (with a short summary here). Her work is in medical ethics, but there are implications for social science experiments as well.
- Over at Future Development, Jishnu Das argues that the pressures for researchers to demonstrate impact are “distorting effort, decreasing the quality of research, and undermining democratic discussion and debate in the countries that need it most.” He argues that we may want to “hold back [ill-informed] policy” (which arguably is still impact, even though it’s negative). He also proposes that researchers are usually not the best people to translate: “I am neither sufficiently skilled, nor sufficiently trained to produce these outputs and having to do so directly impinges on my research… I understand that technical papers may require further translation for a wider audience, but this should be the job of someone trained to communicate complicated subjects.”
- Not before lunch: With a winning title (“Newsflash: Chickens don’t use toilets”), Heady discusses some suggestive evidence from multiple contexts that “exposure to animal feces is a serious risk factor for infections and undernutrition in early childhood.” Get those chickens out of the house! Unless the lost income from chickens stolen or eaten by predators hurts early childhood development more? Darn you, partial derivative!
- Interested in the argument over Universal Basic Income? Shanta Devarajan lays out “three separate arguments for UBI,” and Todd Moss asks, “Universal Basic Income: What Would Mahatma Gandhi Do?” using data from India’s annual Economic Survey (which cites of paper of mine on cash transfers. Just sayin’).
Education stuff
- Doing education research? Anna Popova, Fei Yuan, and I have compiled a database of 500 impact evaluations in education in low- and middle-income countries, tagged by region, country, and outcomes.
- Kattan offers four takeaways from the latest cross-country test of literacy and numeracy in Francophone Africa (the 2014 PASEC) – en français ici.
- Still need some more reading to avoid the rest of your Friday afternoon? Try IPA’s Weekly Links or Future Development Reads.
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