Published on Development Impact

Weekly links July 1: loads of education papers, how to not be a bad referee, how Lyft uses DAGs, why List hates lab-in-the-field as a term, and more…

This page in:

·       On the CGD blog, Dave Evans does a round-up of 30 papers on education presented at the recent RISE conference.

·       Bad refereeing and how to be a constructive referee instead. Tatyana Deryugina uses examples of really terrible referee comments people have shared with her to illustrate what not to do, and to emphasize the importance of offering specific and constructive comments.

·       How Lyft uses causal inference (including DAGs) for forecasting and modelling – and how it breaks up a large and complicated process into submodels it can work with and causally identify through experiments.

·       John List’s tips for doing better field experiments and getting your work published – from his keynote at the Advances in Field Experiments conference. For example, one point is that under some assumptions, with a “stealth” within-subject design, you can not only retrieve average treatment effects, but the entire treatment effect distribution. Another is he does not like the term “lab-in-the-field” experiment.

·       Recent advances in IV methods – YouTube video of a YoungStatS seminar featuring Kirill Borusyak on shift-share IVs, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham on judge/examiner instruments, Stephen Coussens on efficient estimation from compliance weighting and Alexander Torgovitsky on when 2SLS estimates LATE. I look forward to finding time to watch these.

·       Another salvo in the war against really long papers – from July 1, ReStud is putting in place a page limit of 45 pages for submissions (1.5 spaced, including all tables and figures) plus limiting any online appendix to 30 pages. While this still seems long to many people, it is an improvement on the length of some papers.

·       New Funding call: The ReFinD Research Initiative” is excited to announce its 1st RFP. They are looking for innovative and high impact research about the supply side of digital finance, retail finance, agent networks, and related aspects of digital finance retail distribution networks in developing countries. You can apply for funding for program development, pilots, natural experiments, and extensions of existing projects.

·       Call for papers: The 15th international conference on Migration and Development will be held on the beautiful Nova University Lisbon campus on September 15-16. Submissions due by July 25


Authors

David McKenzie

Lead Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank

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