- A simple growth chart poster has a surprisingly large impact on reducing stunting in Zambia according to this IPA brief.
- David Rinnert and Liz Brower of DFID provide a typology of ways evidence is used by policymakers on the Oxfam from poverty to power blog – with examples ranging from the more nebulous “help decision-makers acknowledge the full body of evidence “ to the more concrete, but still hard to pin-down “fed directly into the decision-making”.
- No Sugar: MIT news summarizes and provides background into Noam Angrist’s attempt to scale up Dupa’s Sugar Daddies work in Botswana
- A new journal for replication studies in economics- International Journal for Re-Views in Empirical Economics (IREE)
- Unicef blog on are RCTs bad for children?...” For many in UNICEF, RCT is a bad word. It conjures ideas of cold-hearted researchers arbitrarily withholding programme benefits from some households and villages for the sole purpose of racking up academic publications in journals no one will read, This thinking assumes that other options are equally as good, so we can simply take those evil RCTs off the table and select from other, “pro-children” evaluation methods.”
- Duncan Green on what he learned from a day with the UN’s bloggers – perhaps useful for those of you preparing job market posts: “Lose the first two paras? It was surprising how often, on reading a first draft, the group’s advice was ‘why not start with para 3?’ The first two were often ‘throat clearing’ of various kinds: saying something is important, telling us what we already know etc, before getting into the substance 3 paras in. So just start there instead.”
- Kabira Namit offers 7 tips for field research in education on the Education for Global Development blog.
- ESA mentoring session slidedeck on publishing lab experiments.
- The JEP has a mini-symposium on scaling up: this paper by Al-Ubaydli, List, LoRe and Suskind gives lessons from medicine – “a common occurrence is that such research programs are never scaled, or when they are scaled, the size of the measured treatment effect diminishes substantially relative to the that found in the original study. This is a common phenomenon known in the literature as “voltage drop””
- Job openings: The Africa Gender Innovation Lab is looking for a field coordinator for a social protection program in Zambia; DIME is looking for a field coordinator for a project in industrial parks in Ethiopia.
- Reminder: our blog your job market paper series is now open: we received our first submission this week.
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