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IPA’s weekly links

FinancialDJ

Guest Post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

FinancialDJ

 

  • A new working paper suggests the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments on African-American men may hurt even more people by damaging trust in the medical system. Using GSS data, Marcella Alsan & Marianne Wanamaker conclude that following the 1972 public revelation of the study, fewer African-American men saw doctors, and this shortened their lives significantly:

     

    Our estimates imply life expectancy at age 45 for black men fell by up to 1.4 years in response to the disclosure, accounting for approximately 35% of the 1980 life expectancy gap between black and white men.

    Some important caveats: it appears only for one subgroup, and the paper hasn’t been fully reviewed yet. h/t Rachel Strohm via The Science of Us.

  • Markus Goldstein and David Evans summarize 25 papers on urbanization in Africa.
  • Near the end of Paul Ryan’s anti-poverty plan is a rollback of the new “fiduciary rule” that starting in 2018 financial advisers have to act in their clients’ best interest rather than their own. Why can’t consumers decide for themselves if the financial advice is good? From the NYTimes:

So the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards hired a professional D.J. named Azmyth Kaminski, shaved off his dreadlocks, removed his body piercings and put him in a suit. It taught him a few financial phrases and sat him in a conference room. Then it brought in people looking for a financial adviser.

“We gave him buzzwords, like ‘401(k) is the way to go,’” said Joe Maugeri, managing director for corporate relations at the CFP Board. “I talked to him about 529 plans and he said, ‘All 56 states have 529 plans?’ I said, ‘Well, yes, all 50 of them have them.’ He was a real nice guy.”

So how did he do? After Mr. Kaminski spent about 15 minutes with each person, all but one were ready to work with him, Mr. Maugeri said.

  • Mathematica Policy Research’s new free RCT-YES software package is designed to make it easier to analyze RCT data for those who might not be code experts. I haven’t used it, but it looks like it’s a layer on top of R or STATA that takes care of the code and nicely formats the output. (h/t David Batcheck)
  • Facebook, which has gotten in trouble over conducting experiments on users (involving for example, manipulating emotions through news feeds), published a law review article on revamping their IRB process.
  • There’s a recent working paper from Canice Prendergast who helped a network of food banks solve supply/demand problems. The Planet Money Econ Talk  podcasts explain how a group who literally gives out free lunches got help from a UChicago economist.

Photo above: New York Times/CFP Board

7 Responses

  1. Our estimates imply life expectancy at age 45 for black men fell by up to 1.4 years in response to the disclosure, accounting for approximately 35% of the 1980 life expectancy gap between black and white men.

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