Weekly links July 25: what makes a good behavioral measure, preschools are good, reviewing soft skills, and more…

·       A new working paper/forthcoming handbook chapter by Erik Snowberg and Leeat Yariv on evaluating experimental designs discusses “six criteria for evaluating a measure in experimental or behavioral economics: construct validity, responsiveness, predictive validity, cost, reliability, and stability”, some of the trade-offs involved, and how to think about some of these concepts in economics.

·       Princeton RPDE interview with Eric Verhoogen covers his roundabout path into development economics, working with firms, and the importance of exporting.

·       IPA have a review piece on soft skills training for entrepreneurship and workforce development.” This review discusses some practical elements that might require special attention when implementing soft skills and PI training: curriculum design, participant targeting, alignment with constraints, training dosage, reinforcement mechanisms, and trainer selection.”

·       “A cost-effective at-scale preschool construction programme in Mozambique improved development outcomes of primary-school age children living in extreme deprivation”  - a VoxDev piece by Lelys and her co-authors summarizes an RCT in 218 rural communities that had no pre-schools – half were randomly selected to have preschools constructed and staffed: “preschool enrolment surged from just 2% in control areas to 73% in treated communities, indicating high take-up of the intervention. The programme also led to an increase of 6 percentage points in primary school enrolment, and improved grade progression—with repetition rates falling by 3 percentage points among treated children... looking at the index components, we find gains of 0.17 SD in early literacy, 0.11 SD in math, and 0.14 SD in fine motor skills related to writing”

·       VoxDev post by Oliver Hanney summarizes different posts that use novel types of data in development economics such as mobile phone data, LLMs for textual analysis, satellite imagery, admin records and leaked records of hidden wealth.

·       The World Bank Research Observer (WBRO) seeks to publish policy relevant surveys of development issues, aimed at a broad audience including non-specialists. Papers for consideration at the Fall 2025 meeting of the WBRO Editorial Board should be submitted online to https://academic.oup.com/wbro no later than Tuesday, September 30, 2025.

·       Conference call for papers: The 6^th KDI-World Bank Development Impact conference will take place at the World Bank on Nov 6-7, submissions due August 29. Michael Kremer is the keynote speaker, and they welcome papers on a wide variety of topics in development.