- On the IGC blog, Eliana La Ferrera summarizes different work on fighting poverty with soap operas
- A new repository for data from IPA/J-PAL RCTs. My questionnaires and datasets are in the World Bank’s open data library – and cross-linked from my webpage.
- Dave Evan’s post on systematic reviews last week has had a long series of comments. This week separate response blog posts by a 3ie team and by Langer, Haddaway and Land on the Africa Evidence Network
- Since we just changed to daylight savings time in the US – the LA Times rounds up a set of research results which look at the impacts of daylight savings changes including “Springing forward prompts people to waste time on the Internet”
- IPA/J-PAL policy bulletin summarizing 7 microcredit RCTs “where credit is due” – very nice set of Tables and Figures that summarize the study features and results
- Debate on the role of RCTs for global public health in the journal “Global Health: Science and Practice”. The editor argues that RCTs have limited utility for public health and claims that “Trying to apply the laser-like RCT approach is akin to trying to light up a football stadium with a slowly moving laser pointer—very precise, rigorous, and artificially intense but not very illuminating.”. Laurel Hatt and co-authors offer a rebuttal, arguing that RCTs and other rigorous impact evaluation methods have a critical role to play in public health noting “it is still incumbent on global public health practitioners to answer definitively the question, “Does it work?” before asking, “How can it be made to work practicably at scale?” Programs that are assumed to work are sometimes shown—by random assignment—not to work”
- Good data gone bad – Cherokee Gothic on Justin Sandefur and Amanda Glassman’s work on the political economy of bad data in Africa.
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