- Martin Kanz summarizes his new paper on understanding the demand for status good consumption based on credit card experiments in Indonesia on Let’s Talk Development – including discussion of an intervention that temporarily boosts self-esteem, and showing that this lowers the demand for status goods.
- Nature news on how brain imaging technology is being used to measure how poverty affects brain development of infants in Bangladesh – differences in grey matter already seen at 2-3 months of age!
- Want to check out what’s going on across many fields in economics? The program and papers from the NBER Summer Institute is a great place to see what’s new.
- Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES): In Science this week, Seema Jayachandran and co-authors report on a RCT in Uganda that paid forest-owning households not to cut down their trees – “The program was implemented as a randomized controlled trial in 121 villages, 60 of which received the program for 2 years. The primary outcome was the change in land area covered by trees, measured by classifying high-resolution satellite imagery. We found that tree cover declined by 4.2% during the study period in treatment villages, compared to 9.1% in control villages. We found no evidence that enrollees shifted their deforestation to nearby land.”
- Freakonomics has an interesting podcast this week on “when helping hurts” – about the long-term impacts of what is claimed here to be the first social program RCT – one that provided mentoring and summer camps to at-risk kids in Massachusetts. They discuss the remarkable persistence of Joan McCord in tracking people – including a great example where she wouldn’t take the families word someone was dead, and after a year of effort, interviewed him in a bar where he said his family had disowned him after he went to prison and consider him dead. But also a good lesson in how the best-laid plans to help people can sometimes harm them – aka why we need evaluations.
- Job opportunities: The World Bank’s SIEF is hiring two consultants:
- A consultant for evidence and implementation reviews who will work on reviews that present experimental evidence on implementation questions that World Bank operational teams regularly discuss with client governments.
- A consultant for costing analysis who will work on research related to the collection and analysis of cost data.
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