- Vera te Velde has a post summarizing nine new broken-windows theory experiments with really large effects (via Marginal revolution) and also interesting thoughts on using the Big-5 personality traits.
- What is the single greatest development that will improve clinical trials in medicine? A couple of answers are given: more involvement of patients in trial design, rather than just as subjects; and development of clinical trial leaders in low-income countries – both things that could probably also be done more with RCTs in development economics (although concerns about behavioral responses may push for less involvement of subjects in trial design in some cases).
- Of course the big news of the week was in the “if the results seem too good to be true, sometimes they aren’t” category – excellent detailed analysis by two grad students (and then an assistant professor joining them) uncovers strong evidence that a political science paper published in Science used made-up data, leading to retraction of the paper. Andrew Gelman summarizes on the MonkeyCage blog.
- The Papers and Proceedings edition of the AER is now out. Among the papers of potential interest to our readers are symposia on Energy and Environmental Problems in Developing Countries; Twenty Years of Present Bias; Experiments with Firms in Developing Countries; External Validity of Field Experiments; and on International Trade and Development.
- New Ideas42 white paper on applying behavioral science to poverty in the context of scarcity (and summary post)
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