Published on Development Impact

Weekly links July 26, 2024: scaling impact, fertility impacts of other interventions, summer reading, watching, and listening links

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Young boxers at the White Collars Boxing Match 2019, taken by Mariajose Silva Vargas

·       On VoxDev, Aletheia Donald, Tricia Koroknay-Palicz and Mathilde Sage report on their work pooling together data from six experimental evaluations of business training and land titling interventions in African countries to look at the impact on fertility post-intervention. They find fertility increases after women’s wealth increases and “the hypothesis for which we find the most evidence is that women use childbearing as a strategy to ensure future access to land and income, thereby enhancing their economic security in old age.”

·       On the World Bank’s Data blog, Robert Marty and Alice Duhart summarize their recent work on using anonymized Facebook marketing data to proxy for poverty measurement. Using data for 59 countries and comparing with the DHS surveys “We compare an asset-based wealth index captured in DHS data with over 30 indicators from the Facebook Marketing API. We find that—across countries—characteristics such as the proportion of Facebook users interested in restaurants, the proportion determined to be frequent international travelers, and …the proportion that connect to Facebook via a high-end device are all positively associated with wealth.”. They also introduce a new R package to make it easier to query these data.

·       I am interviewed by Kusi Hornberger for his Scaling Impact Capital podcast, where we have a discussion around business training programs, consulting, capital, and the best ways of supporting growing firms in developing countries – and stick around for the end where I also have to come up with a song that encapsulates a lot of my life.

·       Erin Kelley is interviewed on the backstory podcast about her work on the returns to better long-range weather forecasts, how she builds collaborations, and her strategy for dealing with many different projects at once.

·       Tips for how to read an econometrics paper on Francis DiTraglia’s econometrics blog: “Like anything in life, there are diminishing returns to effort in reading a paper. When reading papers to support your own research, you can be even more selective. The key question becomes: “how is this relevant for what I’m doing?” It may be that you only need to understand a small part of the paper to get what you need”. “When you’re new to topic Y, there will be lots of little things that you’ve never thought of before but that the literature takes for granted. Since most papers are written for specialists by specialists, crucial details are often left out or glossed over as if they were obvious….The reason that reading many papers can help is that different specialists will leave out different details”

·       A couple of papers were released on an experiment which gave 1000 low-income adults in the US $1000 a month for 3 years. Here is a summary of the results in Wired, including of some preliminary results not in the two papers released yet: “roughly 81 cents of each dollar transferred went to higher spending on items such as housing, 22 cents went to leisure, and negative 3 cents went to increased borrowing as recipients took on more car loans and mortgages.” David Broockman has a nice thread on some of the design and measurement details behind the RCT including an app to measure time use, their approach to dealing with so many outcomes, how they kept attrition low, and more. Given the debate around the negative impact on employment, I’ll point to this paper I have with Berk and Sarah Baird on the conditions under which more cash does not simply follow the econ 101 logic of increasing leisure.

·       Jishnu Das on how reversion to the mean can lead to a lot of erroneous statements about the effectiveness of education interventions designed to help lagging schools or kids that score poorly on a test.

·       In Nature, a discussion of the difficulty publishing null results in different fields.

·       The next BREAD virtual PhD course will be on urban economics, starting September 25 with a great line-up of speakers working on developing country cities.

·       The NBER YouTube channel has videos up of a lot of the summer institute talks. On my to watch list is the methods lecture by Susan Athey and Guido Imbens on new developments in experimental design and analysis. There is also the Development masters lecture by Rohini Pande on regulating carbon emissions in low state capacity settings.

·       WBRO fall deadline: ​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 2024 meeting of the WBRO Editorial Board should be submitted online to https://academic.oup.com/wbro  no later than Monday, September 30, 2024.

This will be our last weekly links until September.


David McKenzie

Lead Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank

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