- NPR’s Goats and Soda covers an intervention in poor neighborhoods of Ahmedabad which tried to incentivize kids to attend school by giving them small incentives (two erasers and a pencil) if they attended 85% of the time – the interesting/sad part is that those kids who failed to get the reward were then much less likely to attend school in the post-intervention period, while those who managed to get the incentive reverted back to their previous attendance behavior – so the net impact was a reduction in attendance! (h/t the DevPolicyBlog)
- Marginal revolution covers Karthik and Nishith’s work on the impact of bicycles given to girls in Bihar on their secondary schooling, noting that the IGC has made some very nice videos which both give some views of the program as well as simply explaining the triple-difference strategy used. The video is well worth viewing as an example of how to nicely present your IE results.
- On Let’s Talk Development, Kristen Himelain discusses what types of questions interviewer effects make more difference for
- The Political Science journal PS has ungated a 1995 special issue on replication. Interesting to read the debate between Gary King arguing then for data files to be produced and Paul Hermson arguing instead that “data relinquishment or verification…would harm researchers, journals, the discipline, and the acquisition of knowledge about politics”,“Scholars who collect data should be entitled to reap the full benefits of their data sets so long as they live up to the contractual obligations incurred in conjunction with the data collection process. They should retain the right to be the sole researcher(s) analyzing their data, publishing from their data” and “A line on a resume that reads "data sets archived" is not a publication, and it will do nothing to help a scholar win a promotion, receive tenure, or get a merit-pay increase
- Anatomy of a junk-science study – or how a journalist got people thinking chocolate is good for weightloss
- From the EduTech blog – an updated set of pressing research questions about technology use in education in developing countries
- New Journal: A new journal out of Berkeley called Development Engineering (Dev Eng). Dev Eng will showcase research on innovative technologies for development and novel measurement tools. Submissions now open: http://tinyurl.com/DevEngSubmi. A first issue is expected in September 2015.
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