Published on Development Impact

Weekly links September 6: slow down, when to shut down, incoherence summarized, and more…

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Young boxers at the White Collars Boxing Match 2019, taken by Mariajose Silva Vargas

·       An editorial in Nature summarizes part of Cal Newport’s new book, and argues that “researchers and other knowledge workers need to slow down and spend more time thinking, to focus on maintaining and improving quality in their work”, with this especially important as new communications technologies intrude.

·       On the CGD blog, Eeshani Kandpal and Justin Sandefur have put together a very nice wrap-up of the different sessions and discussion at the summer ABCDE conference on “The Great Incoherence” held at the World Bank and CGD.

·       “We spent the best part of two years championing an intervention — convincing donors to give us significant funds and overworked nurses to change their behavior — that we now believe brought little benefit and drew funds away from more useful programs.” – a refreshing piece in the latest issue of Asterisk on why a charity founded to increase access to family planning in the post-partum period shut itself down.

·       Mariajose Silva-Vargas (who took the wonderful photos we use on our blog) and Ottavia Brussino have a blogpost on using a digital photo documentary to help capture the essence of an intervention – in this case, a social inclusion program being tested in Finnish primary schools. In addition to photos taken by Mariajose, they also gave students cameras to have them capture some of their experiences, with examples available here.

·       I put this Scaling Impact Capital podcast interview with me up before the summer, but somehow the link got corrupted at some point, so I am re-linking to it here with the correct link (apple podcast version also). We have a discussion around business training programs, consulting, capital, and the best ways of supporting growing firms in developing countries.

·       I’ve done the annual update of our curated sets of posts, which help put together some of the key posts from our entire history, sorted into three lists:

o   Technical topics and methodology (random assignment, ethical issues, pre-analysis plans, matching, DiD, RDD, bunching, spatial estimators, event studies, synthetic controls, IV, machine learning, other evaluation methods, analysis, power calculations, external validity, jargon, software tricks, replication, systematic reviews and meta-analysis, book reviews, getting published).

o   Survey methods (surveying during Covid, measurement, survey design, sampling, survey checks and data accuracy, managing survey teams and doing fieldwork, reducing attrition, cost analysis, using photos, admin data, remote sensing).

o   Miscellanea (interviews, advice, policy debates, other).

·       Conference call for papers: the 17th international conference on migration and development will be held at Università di Bologna & SAIS Europe on December 9-10, with submissions due September 20. Submissions should be sent via email to ddifuria@jhu.edu


David McKenzie

Lead Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank

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