· On the CGD Blog, Jack Rossitor, Justin Sandefur and Susannah Hares summarize what they’ve been learning from attempts to track participants in learning interventions down 12-15 years later and see how test score improvements affect later life outcomes. “Our baseline estimate is that a one standard deviation improvement in test scores should raise earnings by roughly 20-30 percent.”
· Dan Hamermesh looks at publication patterns in the AER, QJE and JPE from the 1960s through to 2024. Authors are becoming older, more likely to be female, and the number of authors per paper has increased a lot. “There were no four-authored papers as recently as 1983; today they account for 17 percent of articles. There were no papers with more than four authors in 2003; today nearly 12 percent of articles have five or more …. Obversely, sole-authored papers are now quite scarce; and even two-authored papers today only account for slightly more than one-fourth of all articles” – looks like only 12-14% are sole authored from his Figure. This is coupled by a big increase in the share of papers using original data – and papers using experiments have more authors on average.
· Lant Pritchett on how setting the poverty line too low distorts our view of what development economics should focus on. “Take Pakistan. At the World Bank dollar-a-day (now P$2.15) line the headcount poverty rate is 4.93 percent. But at P$6.85, a poverty line the World Bank also routinely reports–which is still a low poverty line relative to developed countries or what we argue in our paper are defensible upper-bound development poverty lines–the headcount poverty rate is 84.53 percent of the population. One can imagine that targeted programs informed by the results of RCTs might help reduce dollar a day poverty in Pakistan. But it is not at all plausible to think that the level of P$6.85 poverty line poverty does not require broad based improvements in the overall level of productivity of the economy. Programs for “the poor” are not relevant to 84.53 percent of the population.”
· On the heels of Berk’s post this week about lab experiments, a paper by Koppel et al just published in JEBO finds that misunderstanding the lab games is common, especially for individuals with lower numeracy. “Results indicate that misunderstanding is common: the proportion of participants who misunderstood ranged from 22 % (Dictator Game) to 70 % (Trust Game) in the online samples and from 22 % (Dictator Game) to 53 % (Public Goods Game) in the lab sample. Incentivizing the comprehension questions had no significant impact on misunderstanding, but numeracy was associated with lower misunderstanding. Misunderstanding also predicted increased prosocial behavior in several of the games. Our findings suggest that misunderstanding may be important in explaining prosocial behavior,”
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