- Science this week has a feature section on inequality, which is ungated. Includes evidence on how hunter-gatherer tribes keep inequality in check; Martin Ravallion on inequality in the developing world; an excellent review by Johannes Haushofer and Ernst Fehr on the psychology of poverty (includes impacts of Give Directly cash transfers on happiness and cortisol; and discussion of an experiment in which people were given electric shocks to their hands during a risk-taking task to induce fear and stress!); and pieces by Deaton, Autor, Piketty and Saez, and more…Also a nice piece on how Chetty and Saez managed to get access to the IRS tax record data in the first place.
- A reason not to have “I don’t know” as an option in surveys: women hold themselves to a higher level of certainty before expressing an opinion – so are more likely to choose this option if offered it.
- The annual papers and proceedings version of the AER is now up. Lots of interesting short papers to browse, including several on large online courses. Banerjee and Duflo have a short paper on their global poverty online course: people who enroll even a day late do much worse on assignments than those who enroll by the deadline; Cowen and Tabarrok on the industrial organization of online courses – they predict courses will, likely video games, become team productions that cost millions to produce and cater to millions; for development readers there are also papers on insurance in the developing world, and on energy in the developing world.
- In defense of micro-development – Mark Bellemare responds to a post mentioned in last week’s links, which questioned whether what much of development economics is today can properly be called development.
- A nice polisci paper on how to present results using graphs instead of tables, and an associated website with R and (some) Stata code (h/t @MEDevEcon). I hadn’t seen violin graphs before.
- Chris Blattman on his new research in Uganda finding big benefits from cash transfers to the ultra-poor to spur entrepreneurship.
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