- On project syndicate – “Shouldn’t economists ask themselves whether it is morally justifiable to provide even strictly technical advice to self-dealing, corrupt, or undemocratic governments?”
- On Let’s Talk Development, Dan Rogger summarizes some of the latest systems research on the quality of governance; and Bilal Zia summarizes his new paper on how business aspirations are correlated with better small firm outcomes in the cross-section and short panel.
- VoxEU has a new “blogs & reviews” feature – they note that “Very few of the old-style ‘clip and comment’ blogs are still active. On the short and furious end, they have been squeezed by Twitter. On the long, serious end, they have been squeezed by Vox columns and the many Vox-like website that post ‘blogs’..... my idea in launching this new feature is to encourage a much wider range of economists to get into the business of commenting on public policy issues based on their general, research-based knowledge and experience. The essays on this page are far more ‘free form’ than Vox columns. They can be shorter or longer, more technical or more informal.”.
- The Economist this week has two articles on the challenges of survey and administrative data in developed countries: don’t even ask discusses plunging response rates (see figure), noting “that what once was a rare chance to tell someone about your life, is now crowded out by an annoying press of telemarketers and commercial surveyors”, while data hierarchies discusses the rising use of admin data and the concerns this raises about whether it becomes a case of connections and who you know, and whether it makes replication impossible.
- Looking for some summer learning: Berkeley’s BITSS is running its (free) 5-week online course on transparent and open social science research, starting July 9.
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