- Veracities on David Card and Stefano DellaVigna’s work in progress on what gets in top economic journals. They have data on submissions to top journals and assess how editor and referee assessments relate to subsequent citations.
- On Let’s Talk Development, Damien de Walque on giving income transfers to mothers vs fathers, and how a Belgian painting may have it all wrong.
- Andrew Gelman on some issues with reproducibility in economics and the reluctance of journals to consider comments. I like this: “I do think there’s an unfortunate “incumbency advantage” by which published papers with “p less than .05” are taken as true unless a large effort is amassed to take them down. Criticisms are often held to a much higher standard than held for the reviewing of the original paper and, as noted above, many journals don’t publish letters at all…In journals, it’s all about the wedding, never about the marriage”
- J-PAL interview with Oriana Bandiera – watch out, it includes another story about Zambia that has crocodiles and lions on the loose.
- The Washington Post covers the recent experimental evaluation by Seema Jayachandran and co-authors of Payment for Ecosystems Services (PES) to reduce deforestation in Uganda. “owners of forested land in 60 villages in the Hoima and Kibaale districts of western Uganda were offered $ 28 per year (70,000 Ugandan shillings) over two years for every hectare of forest that they did not harvest or chop down for other economic reasons. By comparison, in 61 other villages, nothing was offered — but rates of deforestation were monitored by satellite in all villages.The result was that while forest cover decreased by between 7 and 10 percent in the “control” villages, it only dropped between 2 to 5 percent in the designated “treatment” villages, suggesting that the incentive payments were preventing a significant number of landowners from selling large trees for timber or charcoal, or chopping down forest to grow more crops.”
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