- Andrew Gelman on how to think more seriously about the design of exploratory studies
- Overcoming premature evaluation discussed on the From Poverty to Power blog “There is a growing interest in safe-fail experimentation, failing fast and rapid real time feedback loops…When it comes to complex setting there is a lot of merit in ‘crawling the design space’ and testing options, but I think there are also a number of concerns with this that should be getting more air time…it can simply take time for a program to generate positive tangible and measurable outcomes, and it maybe that on some measures a program that may ultimately be successful dips below the ‘its working’ curve on its way to that success…more importantly it ignores some key aspects of the complex adaptive systems in which programs are embedded…if we are serious about going beyond saying ‘context matters’ then exhortations to ‘fail fast’ need to be more thoroughly debated.”
- Tim Taylor on experimentation with active labor market policies and what the evidence shows.
- Dave Evans offers a sneak peak into Tim Ogden’s new book with “has the war over RCTs been won” (thoughts from Esther and Abhijit) and “how RCTs lead to innovation” (Michael Kremer)
- The most followed economists on twitter according to RePEc
- Call for papers: 10th international conference on Migration and Development
- Reminder that Tuesday is our deadline for our blog your job market paper series. The first post will be up on Monday.
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