Published on Development Impact

Weekly Links February 14: Valentines, Generalizability, Distinguishing a Prominent Development Economist from Your Drunk Uncle, and More…

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  • For Valentine’s Day: of course there is a literature on this – from PhD comics comes abstracts of real papers such as “Me Do Wu My Val: The Creation of Valentine’s Day in Accra, Ghana”; and “Influence of Valentine’s Day and Halloween on Birth Timing”.
  • Cyrus Samii on too much concern about “representativeness” and “generalizability”.
  • On the CGD Blog, Amanda Glassman makes a plea for donors to fund statistical agencies in developing countries better – especially for vital statistics and censuses.
  • The Campaign for Boring Development continues its promising start – this week a post on Angus Deaton’s view of aid “Are we helicopter parenting the African State?”, finishing with the killer line “When one of the field’s founders and giants starts making an argument functionally indistinguishable from the one your drunk republican uncle makes over Thanksgiving when you say you’ve been working on an aid project in Senegal, you know things have come to a head.”
  • Summer workshop on transparency: Transparency Practices for Empirical Social Science Research, June 2-5, 2014, University of California, Berkeley: Registration is now open for the first BITSS summer institute. The workshop is designed for students, post-docs, and junior faculty eager to learn more about new transparency tools available and appropriate for research in economics, political science, psychology and related disciplines. Instructors include leading scholars from across the social sciences. Course description and registration instructions are available on the ICPSR Summer Program Portal. All application materials must be submitted no later than Wednesday, March 26.

Authors

David McKenzie

Lead Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank

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