· Transparency and Data: On the J-PAL blog, James Turitto and Keesler Welch summarize talks given at the recent annual meeting of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences. Includes an update from Andrew Foster at the JD: they have now received 85 submissions for pre-results review, accepted 10-12 phase I papers, and close to one phase II (around 2:48 here) – he also talks about his evolving views on what the optimal time is to submit these registered reports and how it is a bit harder to evaluate them because of uncertainty about what the variances will be;, and a presentation by the AEA data editor on their new policies – including a graph showing what code people use – Stata is by far the most dominant, followed by Matlab (and he notes that Matlab coders are not as good as Stata coders in making clear code). See also this set of tweets from the AEA data editor on how to cite data.
· Webinar on Small Business Training: On Thursday, February 20th at 10am I'll be joining Tim Ogden of FAI on faiVLive (if you read Development Impact but don't subscribe to the faiV weekly newsletter, you should), a webinar/live podcast, to talk about research on SME productivity and training interventions. From the description: "Tim and David will discuss what we know about small business performance and productivity, the importance of management, and training impact evaluations." The session will be recorded and available after for those who can't make that time, I'm told. Register here.
· What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. A new working paper assembles a set of 13 short, nontechnical briefing notes prepared in response to this request – and includes lessons for design, implementation, and evaluation of policies.
· SIEF from Evidence to Policy note on mobile tutoring and learning in remote schools in Mexico.
· Conference calls for papers:
o NBER summer institute Development Economics program: submissions due March 18 by noon.
o BREAD conference at Northwestern: submissions due March 6.
o Reminder: 13th Migration and Development conference: submissions due Feb 15.
o Barcelona GSE Summer Forum: submissions due Feb 28.
o 2021 AEA meetings: The deadline for submissions to be considered for the January 2021 AEA Meeting program in Chicago is April 1, 2020 for individual papers and April 15, 2020 for complete sessions. The submission portal will open on March 1, 2020 at https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/submissions.
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