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In the latest JEL, Parker and Todd survey the literature on Progresa/Oportunidades: some bits of interest to me included:
- CCTs have now been used in 60+ countries;
- over 100 papers have been published using the Progresa/Oportunidades data, with at least 787 hypotheses tested – multiple testing corrections don’t change the conclusions that the program had health and education effects, but do cast doubt on papers claiming impacts on gender issues and demographic outcomes;
- FN 16 which notes that at the individual level, there are significant differences in 32% of the 187 characteristics on which baseline balance is tested, with the authors arguing that this is because the large sample size leads to a tendency to reject the null at conventional levels – a point that seems inconsistent with use of the same significant levels for measuring treatment effects;
- Two decades later, we still don’t know whether Progresa led to more learning, just more years in school;
- One of the few negative impacts is an increase in deforestation in communities which received the CCT
- Dave Evans asks whether it matters which co-author submits a paper, and summarizes responses from several editors; he also gives a short summary of a panel on how to effectively communicate results to policymakers.
- NPR’s Goats & Soda blog discusses the ethics of experiments which give cash to some people and not others.
- The New Yorker discusses an attempt to change the way undergraduate economics is taught.
- “To measure the success of RCTs over the past 20 years solely on the basis of whether they led to scale-ups misses some of the most interesting insights that these studies have generated.” – Alejandro Ganimian on the RISE blog on education reform from RCTs.
- In VoxDev, Anukriti, Bhalotra and Tam discuss how the availability of ultrasound technology in India has influenced different components of the missing girls issue: it has increased sex-selective abortion, but also narrowed gender gaps in fertility (whereby parents used to be much more likely to have an additional kid if their first was a girl than a boy), and also has narrowed gender gaps in breast-feeding. VoxDev also covers my formalization work in Benin, where we show how species classification methods can help identify ex-ante which firms are most likely to respond to formalization efforts.
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