- Why the World Bank needs a research department: Penny Goldberg offers a strong rationale on Let’s Talk Development
- On VoxDev, Battaglia, Gulesci and Madestam summarize their work on flexible credit contracts, which is one my favorite recent papers – they worked with BRAC in Bangladesh to offer borrowers a 12 month loan, with borrowers having the option to delay up to two monthly repayments at any time during the loan cycle. This appears to be a win-win, with the borrowers being more likely to grow their firms, and the bank experiencing lower default and higher client retention. However, although the post doesn’t discuss it, the product seemed less successful in helping larger SMEs.
- Political business cycles in Africa – Rachel Strohm notes a Quartz Africa story on a phenomenon that has held up a number of my impact evaluations – “Having contracts stalled and major projects abandoned is “very common”... The uncertainty is also magnified because newly-elected administrations could take months to form a cabinet and appoint heads of key agencies... as a bulk of voters travel to their ancestral homes to cast their ballot, businesses are forced to shutter or maintain skeletal operations... [this] has even made phrases like “after elections” a colloquial mainstay”.
- The JDE interviews Eric Edmonds about his experience with the registered report process: “I thought I wrote really good pre-analysis plans and then I saw the template and realized, no, I write really bad pre-analysis plans too. I think just the act of providing that template to give some kind of standardization, is a great service to the profession... I think we need to be in a place where we have pre-analysis plans and we review them, and when we choose to deviate from them in our analysis, we're just able to be clear and to talk about why that is.” (h/t Ryan Edwards)
- Lee Crawfurd offers one-sentence summaries of 22 papers on global education recently presented at the SREE conference – including reasons to be cautious of many studies - “Studies commissioned by the developer of an intervention find effect sizes 80% larger than studies commissioned independently” and “Tests designed specifically for evaluations produce effect sizes 63% larger than generic tests”
- On Andrew Gelman’s blog, a nice picture to illustrate the type M (magnitude)/type S (sign) error problem
- Job opening: J-PAL is seeking a policy manager for its political economy and governance sector.
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Conference calls for papers:
- Trademark East Africa is calling for papers for a conference on gender and trade to be held in Nairobi (papers due April 30)
- Chicago/LSE/CEPR conference on the economics of social sector organizations to be held in London (papers due April 19).
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