- HBR provides an update on the working from home experiment done by Nick Bloom and co-authors. This experiment worked with China’s largest travel agency, and randomly choose workers to be allowed to work from home. They find workers are more productive when they do so. The interesting new finding is that when, at the end of the experiment, the treatment group was given a choice “half of the home-workers changed their minds and returned to the office and three quarters of the control group — who had initially all requested to work from home — decided to stay in the office” – the authors find it is the most productive workers who prefer to work from home.
- Science this week has a special issue on the topic of privacy (all ungated for the next week): of particular interest to our readers may be a piece on the extent to which anonymized credit card transaction data can be used to identify people and a review article by George Lowenstein and co-authors which among other things, summarizes what we know about how much people value privacy “attempts to pinpoint exact valuations that people assign to privacy may be misguided, as suggested by research calling into question the stability, and hence validity, of privacy estimates.”
- The IADB blog covers a recent IFC meta-evaluation of interventions in agribusiness: the claim is that “the provision of credit alone is not enough to improve adoption, production, productivity, income or profits (For these indicators, the results were mixed and not conclusive ): credit has to be combined with some training or other complementary interventions.”
- Xkcd on p-values:
Join the Conversation