· A very nice profile of Berk from Stanford’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab, discussing his work on adaptive experiments in Cameroon, as well as his “circuitous route” into development economics, what he is excited about working on next, and more.
· Alvarez, Ferman and Wüthrich have a new review paper on inference with few treated units. “In many causal inference applications, only one or a few units (or clusters of units) are treated….A key challenge in such settings is that standard inference methods based on asymptotic theory may be unreliable, even when the total number of units is large”. Here one needs to make more assumptions to make progress, typically relying on model-based approaches. “We organize the presentation of the different model-based inference methods according to data availability. We first consider methods that are valid even in the extreme case in which there is only one treated unit and one treated period. The main challenge in this setting is that there is very limited information on the distribution of potential outcomes of the treated unit in the treated period. Therefore, the solutions proposed in the literature rely on extrapolating cross-sectional information from the untreated units or time-series information from untreated periods to infer the distribution of the treated potential outcomes. The choice between these alternatives should depend on the data availability and on the assumptions one is willing to make regarding the distribution of the errors in modeling the potential outcomes”.
· On VoxDev, Oliver Hanney highlights one use of null results: stopping ineffective interventions, and summarizes a range of studies on VoxDev that have found null results.
· Beatriz Gietner has a nice DiD Digest substack: the latest post summarizes 4 recent papers around DiD, including new work on triple differences with controls. I like the format of her summaries: what the paper is about, what the author does, why is it important, who should care, and is there code you can use.
· J-PAL spotlight interview with Danila Serra, about her work on female role models for influencing career choice among young women, and preliminary results from a study in Peru which used Instagram reels in which current university students in engineering could show high school students what life at university looks like – leading to a positive impact on enrolment in college a year later.
· ETRM interview with Claudio Ferraz. “A big question is: “How do we think about the good policies, while bringing in the political economy constraints”. I think we understand very little of the political economy constraints, the settings that politicians are in and the incentives they have to adopt policies, such as those that will improve people’s lives in the short run but are not helpful in the long term. The literature in political economy has moved towards documenting some of the failures in developing countries but we haven’t moved towards understanding the other side of it: what are the political economy constraints that incentivize the adoption of the good policies?”
· ETRM also interviews Dean Karlan, who talks about the role of macro-micro work, the outlook for people looking to go into development economics as a career, whether the benefits of foreign aid not being visible to citizens in developed countries is a problem, and more…
· James Robinson’s CSAE keynote talk on “Wealth in People” is now on YouTube. His starting point is “how would I think about African development in a positive light?” – rather than just focusing on economics and the Great Divergence, he notes that Africa was very successful in creating polities (independent sovereign political societies) – with an estimated 42,000 created.
· Funding: for research on how and when research evidence is used in policymaking in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. There are separate calls for EOIs for work on how evidence has been used; and for evaluations of interventions intended to increase the use of evidence.
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