Published on Development Impact

Weekly links October 14: fake doctors and dubious health claims, real profits, refugees, reweighting, and more…

This page in:
  • In Science this week: what refugees do Europeans want? A “conjoint experiment” with 180,000 Europeans finds they want high-skilled, young, fluent in the local language, who are persecuted and non-Muslim (5 page paper, 121 page appendix!). This involved showing pairs of refugees with randomly assigned characteristics and having them say whether they supported admitting the refugee, and if they could only choose one out of the pair, which one.
  • BBC News covers the recent science paper by Jishnu Das and co-authors on training ‘fake doctors’ in India (or for more study details, see the MIT press release which has a great photo-bomb)
Points to note:
  • We are interested in examples of failures of impact evaluations (research project failures) as opposed to failures of development projects more generally
  • Please send it as a Word document in 11 point Calibri font.
  • If you have any pictures/graphs, send this as a .jpg attachment
  • Keep it short, and try and draw out the lessons for others
  • Make sure to be specific and concrete in the advice from this – as Markus told me “a lesson to work harder and pay more attention” isn’t so helpful.
  • The intention is not to embarrass anyone, but help improve work going forward. So anonymize parties as needed.
  • We will be doing our usual job-market series again this year, and will announce a call for these posts later this month – and will try hard not to confuse the two series! 

Authors

David McKenzie

Lead Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank

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