· VoxDev has a summary by Heckman and co-authors of the impacts of a home-visiting program in China. This is a scale-up based on a famous Jamaica study from over 30 years ago that only had around 100 kids – the new study has 1500+ participants (with a village-level randomization of 55 matched pairs of villages), and finds the program over the first two years “has a strong impact on language and cognitive skills, fine motor skills, and social-emotional skills. Impacts are especially strong for children in the most disadvantaged communities.”
· On the IFPRI blog, Alan de Brauw and Sylvan Herskowitz discuss some challenges with the inverse hyperbolic sine for estimating elasticities. They show that in the presence of quite a few zeros, the elasticity does not converge when different scaling factors are tried.
· J-PAL is holding a webinar series on administrative data use in research, accompanying the release of the Handbook on Using Administrative Data in Research and Evidence-Based Policy. Each webinar covers one of the technical chapters and case studies included in the handbook and is presented by the authors, followed by a live Q&A. The handbook itself will be released in the coming weeks.
· On the STATA blog, requesting data through an API using the python/Stata integration.
· Are we over the hump of peak COVID-19 research, and what have we learned so far? Tim Taylor reports that at the e-journal COVID economics “the flow of submissions has been slowing, from 6-7 submissions per day back in April to 1-2 submissions per day now”, and links to some recent Brookings Papers pulling together existing research.
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