- Following on my book review of Grit, Lee Crawfurd uses surveys from 10 developing countries to examine the correlations between grit and income, years of education, and learning outcomes - and finds grit has a statistically significant correlation with schooling in each country (but explains very little of its variation), and has no significant correlations with either income earned or learning achieved.
- A summary of the evidence on the effects of naturalization/becoming a citizen on labor market outcomes via IZA World of Labor
- Tim Harford on experiments on incentivizing workers, including new work by John List and co-authors on incentivizing pilots “If you want people to do a good job, tell them what success looks like to you — and that you’ve noticed when they’ve achieved it.”
- The p-hacker app by Felix Schönbrodt – train your expert p-hacking skills.
- How development can go horribly wrong on a small island – Australia’s Earshot podcast on the Secret History of Nauru (look for episode 6/12/2016) – including phosphate mining, offshore banking, and even an investment in one of the worst WestEnd musicals
- Bruce Wydick on how development economists need to do more diagnosis before trying to measure impact
- Papers and keynote presentations from the ABCDE conference this week are now up online
- NEUDC will take place at MIT Sloan Nov 5-6, with submissions due August 15. So get busy working on those papers this summer.
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