- Dave starts his blogging in his new home: Over at the CGD blog, Dave Evans and Fei Yuan discuss their new work reviewing 250+ interventions to try and figure out how best to help girls succeed in school. The key finding is that to improve learning for girls, general interventions that improve pedagogy for all students seem to be most effective.
- Should Professors (and other researchers) be given project management training? Interesting thread by @FaiolaLabUCI with some suggestions of different courses and tools out there to manage projects including materials for a U Wisconsin graduate workshop on project management, suggestions for different software that can help, and more. Anyone done or know of a managing field projects project management workshop/course?
- Also on twitter, I noticed the lack of economics papers (none in the last 5 months) at the journal Science, and asked the Social Sciences editor for an explanation. Tage Rai very kindly replied, noting some of the challenges with econ papers, authors and referees, and what he is doing to lower barriers to trying this avenue.
- New Stata and R code for binscatter methods courtesy of Cattaneo et al. – the key features are providing a better way to adjust for covariates than residualizing data, a way of choosing the number of bins in a less ad hoc manner, and the addition on confidence intervals. They note that if the underlying function is non-linear, using linear projections to residualize can result in uninterpretable results – and so implement a partial linear model to adjust by.
- In Nature, Scientists rise up against statistical significance- “Statistically significant estimates are biased upwards in magnitude and potentially to a large degree, whereas statistically non-significant estimates are biased downwards in magnitude. Consequently, any discussion that focuses on estimates chosen for their significance will be biased.”
- Job opening: CEGA is looking to hire a director of research (applications due March 31).
- Funding opportunity: The World Bank Robert S. McNamara (RSM) Fellowships Program (RSMFP) awards grants of up to $25,000 to PhD candidates in developing country universities to conduct development-related research for a period of 6-10 months abroad, under the supervision of an adviser at a host institution. This is a wonderful opportunity for the most promising developing nation researchers to advance their doctoral work on a development topic with the best international advisors and host institutions in their fields of study (applications due May 2)
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