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Happy St Patrick’s Day. In honor of this day:
- Forthcoming in the WBER, Catia Batista and Gaia Narcisco conducted an experiment with immigrants in Ireland to see whether making it easier to communicate with their families changed remitting behavior – they find migrants send more money as a result.
- Thank Guinness: as you sip your pints today, remember that your t-ratios and some of the first blocked small sample experiments were invented by W.S. Gosset (aka Student), who served as Guinness’ Brewer-in-Charge of the Experimental Brewery
- On the LSE impact blog, top ten tips for social scientists seeking to influence policy.
- Which are better to collect sensitive data – focus groups or individual interviews? Annette Brown discusses an RCT which tests this.
- On the IGC blog, explaining the low and declining labor-force participation of rural women in India.
- From IZA World of Labor: the size of the gender difference in risk attitudes varies a lot with the method used to measure risk aversion – I learnt here about the cool “bomb risk elicitation task”, which apparently shows no gender difference.
- Fewer IRBs? “surveys, interviews, and other forms of free communication between researchers and human adults, aptitude testing, the observation and recording of verbal and nonverbal behavior in schools and public places (for example, courtrooms), benign behavioral interventions (including ordinary psychology experiments), secondary-data analysis, and other low-risk projects and research procedures” may all soon become exempt from IRBs…”Socrates himself would probably roll over in his grave if he knew about the hoops his academic heirs in the humanities, law, and the social sciences have been jumping through in recent decades to even gain permission to ask questions”
- Funding call: BITSS is funding $30k grants that aim to advance understanding and design of new methodological approaches in transparency for reproducibility and reliability, as well as meta-analysis using existing data and literature. See the 2017 RFP here.
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