- Milli Lake and Sarah Parkinson on the ethics of fieldwork preparedness – “It’s one of the discipline’s worst kept secrets that graduate students, in particular, feel practically unprepared for their fieldwork… We worry about an intellectual trend that increasingly rewards researchers for “out-dangering” one another (often with dubious scholarly gain). This doesn’t mean scholars should abandon fieldwork; it means that we should take the practical and ethical components of its planning and implementation more seriously. We can start by asking simple questions about first aid, check-ins, transport safety, and data protection”
- Justin Sandefur on “is daycare a bad investment for Latin America?” – home visits show better cognitive outcomes than daycare does for kids – but access to low-cost childcare is important for helping mothers be able to work.
- In a recent Science article, Ray Fisman and Miriam Golden discuss how to fight corruption – focusing on the importance of thinking of the strategic responses of those who benefited from wrongdoing in the first place, and of other unexpected effects – including how CCTV monitoring of exams in Romania moved from an equilibrium of collective bribes that paid for whole classrooms to cheat, to individual bribes in which only rich kids could.
- On the Future Development blog, Jishnu Das pens an open letter to Oxfam about providing health services to the poor.
- Stata 15 is now out.
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