- The NYTimes describes ongoing USAID attempts to benchmark some of its programs against cash: “The initiative has operated in stealth mode, in part because of fears that the idea of giving tax dollars to poor Africans might provoke objections from Congress or the White House. The project also poses a threat to hundreds of for-profit companies and nonprofit groups that secure U.S.A.I.D. contracts, often with scant evidence of impact”. Quartz Africa has a follow-up piece which has results from the first of these trials, comparing a standard USAID water and sanitation program in Rwanda to just giving cash. They find the WASH program doesn’t have much impact, cash-equivalent amounts do slightly more, and a larger cash grant has wide-ranging impacts. “You should be tipping the scale to doing more for fewer people... water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) programs could devote less of their resources to education and behavior change, and more to direct support”. Here’s another good summary at Vox.
- Following on Wednesday’s blog about the declare design platform, their team have now set up a blog to give examples of use. The first post looks at the question of whether a non-experimental study should control for a pre-treatment variable that is correlated with both treatment and the outcome.
- Dylan Matthews at Vox has a balanced look at the Blattman et al. 9-year follow-up that Berk blogged on earlier this week.
- The UpJohn Institute’s Employment Research newsletter has a summary of a conference on job search and vacancies, focusing on insights from firm-level data on job postings. Interesting descriptives about how online job posting markets work on several platforms, including one in China.
- The Stata Lasso page- with slides describing new tools in LASSOPACK which also do elastic nets, ridge regression, etc. as well as lasso, with tools for cross-validation and theory-based regularization parameter selection, as well as psdlasso tools for double-selection lasso. Also new Stata code for poverty mapping/small area estimation (ssc install sae).
- At VoxDev, Brooks and Donovan summarize their paper on how building bridges in Nicaragua allowed rural residents to smooth income shocks due to seasonal flooding – moreover, “the option to work in town allows villagers to generate income when times are bad, thereby freeing resources previously held as precautionary savings to be spent on productive farm activities.”
- The latest JEL has a nice review piece by Christensen and Miguel on transparency, reproducibility and credibility in economics research
- In the All About Finance blog, Bruhn, Reddy and Ruiz use difference-in-differences to show how a program in Mexico that provided technical assistance grants to credit unions led them to lend more at lower interest rates.
- Finally, if you don’t already get Ugo Gentilini’s weekly social protection links, check them out here.
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