- Data Colada on how to properly pre-register a study: “it may be helpful to imagine a skeptical reader of your paper. Let’s call him Leif. Imagine that Leif is worried that p-hacking might creep into the analyses of even the best-intentioned researchers. The job of your preregistration is to set Leif’s mind at ease. This means identifying all of the ways you could have p-hacked – choosing a different sample size, or a different exclusion rule, or a different dependent variable, or a different set of controls/covariates, or a different set of conditions to compare, or a different data transformation – and including all of the information that lets Leif know that these decisions were set in stone in advance”…but on the other hand “it should contain only the information that is essential for the task at hand… We have seen many preregistrations that are just too long… you don’t need to say in the preregistration everything that you will say in the paper. A hard-to-read preregistration makes preregistration less effective…” – comes with a nice example table of what bad specifications and good specifications look like.
- The podcast Trade Talks does its first podcast on developing countries – they interview Nina Pavcnik on how trade liberalization has impacted workers and firms in the developing world. “In reality, moving from one occupation to another, or from one location to another does not happen easily…people don’t move out of areas that suffer from import competition”
- On the Brookings Future Development blog, Shanta Devarajan offers his thoughts on 6 recent surprising findings in development economics.
- Rachel Glennerster offers different examples of how “innovate, test, then scale” can work in practice to bring evidence to have policy impact at scale.
- Aid thoughts on what machine learning may mean for replication efforts
- Harvard’s CID has recently launched its Atlas of Economic Complexity – lots of great visualization of trade statistics – you can see which countries have the most and least complex exports, and get great visualizations of exports and imports over time, by product, and by destination.
- Conference call: the 2018 Midwest International Development Conference
- Reminder: our blog your job market paper series is still open
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