- In this week’s Science, Rema Hanna, Gabriel Kreindler, and Ben Olken look what happened when Jakarta abruptly ended HOV rules – showing how traffic got worse for everyone. Nice example of using Google traffic data – MIT news has a summary and discussion of how the research took place : “The key thing we did is to start collecting traffic data immediately,” Hanna explains. “Within 48 hours of the policy announcement, we were regularly having our computers check Google Maps every 10 minutes to check current traffic speeds on several roads in Jakarta. ... By starting so quickly we were able to capture real-time traffic conditions while the HOV policy was still in effect. We then compared the changes in traffic before and after the policy change.”All told, the impact of changing the HOV policy was highly significant. After the HOV policy was abandoned, the average speed of Jakarta’s rush hour traffic declined from about 17 to 12 miles per hour in the mornings, and from about 13 to 7 miles per hour in the evenings”
- From NPR’s Goats and Soda: 4-year kids of Cameroonian subsistence farmers take the marshmallow test, as do German kids – who do you think did best?
- Rethinking the famous paper on hungry judges giving harsher sentences – the 20% statistician discusses why he thinks “As psychologists, we shouldn’t teach or cite this finding, nor use it in policy decisions as an example of psychological bias in decision making.”
- Russ Roberts interviews Chris Blattman on his latest podcast – with discussion of where Chris thinks we are having an impact, why he won’t make policy recommendations about violence yet, and more.
- Duncan Green on what academics should do if they are serious about having impact, with some good push back in the comments.
- VoxDev covers my work on the limited effectiveness of ALMPs (now with graphs!), and on how the imbalanced sex ratio in China fuels housing price inflation due to the need to compete on the marriage market.
- Good practices for implementing CCTs – a new book by the IADB drawing on lessons from 20 years of implementation in Latin America.
- And maybe reproducibility isn’t so easy in medicine easier: (on cancer experiments): What Sells draws from her experience in the lab is that she is acutely aware of how hard it is to get the same results consistently. "We often joke about the situations under which things do work, like it has to be raining and it's a Tuesday for it to work properly," she says. "That is something we think about a lot."
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