- Do people work harder when they believe in the cause of the organization? Andres Marroquin blogs about a new paper which tests this experimentally – by randomly assigning individuals to work at either the Obama or Romney campaigns! People are more productive when working for the guy they like – but performance-based incentives help offset this.
- Dean Karlan gives his take on the ethics of the Millennium Villages non-evaluation strategy on the Freakonomics blog.
- On the CGD blog, Justin Sandefur gives his summary of a new paper on the difficulties involved in extrapolating results, fighting a strawman World Bank specialist as he goes….stay tuned for our take on this paper.
- What would happen if the US went to universal pre-school? Latest from Brookings conference looks at Georgia and Oklahoma which introduced this, and compares to other states which didn’t – find big gains in access and even some gains in grade 8 math scores for low-income kids, rich kids switch from private to public pre-schools, and no change in mother’s work.
- The 3ie Registry for International Development Impact Evaluations (RIDIE) is now live – it will register any development impact evaluation that rigorously attempts to estimate the causal impacts of a program, including but not limited to randomized control trials. It is intended to be a prospective registry in which researchers and evaluators can record information about their evaluation designs before conducting the analysis, as well as update information as the study proceeds and post findings upon study completion. The first 100 studies registered go into a draw to win IPads and Surface tablets. The AEA also has its registry live. I hope to register studies in both over the next week and will report back…
- Call for papers: The MidWest International Economic Development conference to be held at Minnesota in the spring.
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