IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

  • Pretty good piece in SSIR by Kevin Starr and Sarah Miers of the Mulago Foundation, why don’t big NGOs scale up other social entrepreneurs’ solutions? They spoke to a bunch of leaders and once they got past the laughter and disbelief at the idea, found
    • “Not created here syndrome” that everybody knows about
    • Big funders like government aid agencies prioritize project-based work
    • Differing priorities at country vs. headquarters
    • Hard to replicate someone else’s idea and get it to work

They recommend looking for what’s already out there instead of re-inventing the wheel in house.  BTW, I believe Anne Karing’s fantastic bracelets as social nudges for vaccinations project in Sierra Leone came from exploring ideas that had already been implemented or proposed by health workers and were discontinued or shelved for one reason or another.

  • The economics behind the economics of the COVID vaccine: the WHO is trying to avoid a repeat of slowdowns in H1N1 vaccine distribution in low-income countries because of confusion over who would be liable for any adverse reactions. They are setting up a facility to fund liability claims if anybody in any of 92 economies has a negative medical consequence from a COVID vaccine. It sets up a mechanism outside the courts (which can be expensive and slow) to compensate victims and indemnify manufacturers, but it’s still unclear where the funding would come from.
  • Costco will join other chains to stop selling a brand of Thai of coconut milk after allegations of forced monkey labor.
  • An advice thread looking for good books about development. This was my entry, a collaboration between graphic novelist Victoria Jamieson (who I gather is well-known) and Omar Mohamed: When Starts Are Scattered. It’s about growing up in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya. I liked how it was told very matter of fact, not playing up suffering, and from a kid’s perspective.

 

  • Jobs:
  • As the Tanzanian election arrives and is looking not great, Vodafone is being accused of blocking text messages with the opposition candidate’s name (article might be gated). If true, and a private company is trying to influence an election outcome, it’s a quite serious precedent.
  • Fantastic trilogy of podcasts from Rough Translation (Apple) on protest movements, my favorite has to be the researcher protesting Uganda’s government with nudity and profane poetry, but Indian caste discrimination in Silicon Valley, and China fan fiction were great also.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • You can register for the big NEUDC development conference, featuring an opening address by Penny Goldberg, held Fri Nov 6 – Sat Nov 7, now all online!
    • You can also still submit an abstract (500 word limit) for a lightning round session, deadline Monday!
  • Cool paper comparing 150 education interventions from Noam Angrist, David Evans, Deon Filmer, Rachel Glennerster, F. Halsey Rogers and Shwetlena Sabarwal. They use a common metric, how much of a year’s worth of education in a high performing country like Singapore a program would give and, (when possible) for how much money. They find the best deals in 3 interventions:
    • Giving families information about how much staying in school is worth to a child’s future earnings
    • Teacher professional development and monitoring
    • And targeted instruction, making sure the content being taught is correct for each child’s level (including programs like catch-up tutoring for kids who can’t keep up with the class):

In India, targeted instruction yields up to 4 additional learning-adjusted years of schooling per $100—a gain equivalent to the entire system-level education gap between India and Argentina.

  • IPA is part of a consortium of organizations promoting a combination of inexpensive testing and targeting instructions to help make up learning losses from COVID school closings around the world, and is trying to get the word out to education policymakers and organizations. Learn more in a webinar on October 29th.
  • Job info:
    • Job Market Candidates, the annual Blog Your Job Market Paper opportunity is open on the Dev Impact Blog! (submission deadline Nov 5).
    • It’s a rough job market all around, FWIW I spoke to a friend of mine who is in the niche business of assessing economic damages for trials (a form of litigation consulting), who said the field is going like gangbusters and it’s a fine job for econ Ph.D.s, though like any non-academic field you have to quickly get up to speed in the unwritten rules of what counts as important (the legal world has its own ways of arguing and presenting information, though once you’ve mastered it, it’s pretty straightforward), so you need to find somewhere willing to train you and not throw you in the deep end. In his experience Stata is standard, though he’s heard of people using R. He recommends approaching firms through recruiters or the contact email on the website (which is usually monitored by someone high up since that’s how clients find them).
    • Another amazing job opportunity, Research Director at GiveDirectly, based in Kampala, Kigali, Lilongwe, London, Monrovia, Nairobi or New York.
    • And the World Bank’s Gender Innovation Lab is hiring for a 3-year postdoc (or Master’s + 4 yrs experience) on measures for advancing gender equality.
    • 2 postdocs in development economics for scholars from low- and middle-income countries at the University of Göttingen in Germany
    • And fellowships at Brookings
  • The nice folks at the Financial Access Initiative have a webinar Oct 28th on what we do and don’t know about helping low-income families save (in the U.S. and abroad).
  • I don’t recommend listening to Tyler Cowen’s conversation with Michael Kremer while driving, because I missed my turn engrossed in his explanation of how incentives work for innovation, including vaccine development. I knew about Advance Market Commitments (commitments in advance to buy enough doses to make the initial R&D investment profitable), which had worked for a pneumonia vaccine in low-income countries (partially, since much of the R&D had already been done for strains in wealthy countries). I didn’t know that the original committee had also recommended a malaria AMC, but that was shelved in favor of one that offered (perhaps for political reasons) a more likely short-term win.
  • And Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs will face the highest fine ever (in the low billions) for violating anti-corruption laws, funneling money from a multi-billion dollar Malaysian investment fund  called 1MDB  into personal pockets:

In all, some $2.7 billion of the money raised for 1MDB was stolen by people connected to the country’s former prime minister and diverted for bribes, a luxury yacht, fine art and even funding for the Hollywood movie “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

  • I’m working on a new email newsletter, with colleagues including Rachel Strohm (who has been a well-respected dev blogger for years). IPA’s tracking studies on COVID related issues in low- and middle-income countries (along with survey instruments and funding opportunities) on our RECOVR research hub (please submit yours, and let colleagues know). Every other week we’re highlighting some new results from there and elsewhere we come across, particularly as relates to social protection, but also related topics. Volumes one and two are on our blog, and you can sign up to get it on our email list (after you sign up you can adjust which kinds of emails you get).
  • I’ve been skeptical of the nudge craze but have been eagerly awaiting the results of the NYC Summons redesign (image above) from Ideas42 for a while, and the results, published last week in Science, are better than I expected. Alissa Fishbane, Aurelie Ouss, Anuj K. Shah report on an experiment with New York City redesigning summons that police officers issue for low-level offenses, requiring people to appear in court. About 100,000 people miss their court dates in the city every year, causing arrest warrants to be issued, but simply redesigning the form to be more understandable and explaining what’s required of people reduced failures to show up from 47% to 40.8%. Adding an additional text message reminder brought it down to 28%. (Summary from Science’s news side here). The tragedy of all the lives ruined by bad administrative design is hard to ignore.
  • Ideas42 is also working on an interesting new project, Ideas42 Ventures, which is looking to support entrepreneurs working on software solutions to social problems, specifically excess costs of poverty (deadline to apply, Oct 25).
  • Michel Azulai, Imran Rasul, Daniel Rogger, and Martin Williams report on an RCT of a simple one-day management training for members of Ghana’s civil service, and found effects on knowledge, attitudes, and team productivity 6-18 months later.
  • I’ve been listening to some of today’s Penn-Wharton Conference on Race and Economics (live stream here, don’t know how long it will last), A couple things that jumped out at me from the panel discussing racial inclusion in the field were Modibo Sidibe saying he couldn’t advise someone who’s in a minority group to go into an econ graduate program, knowing all the obstacles they’d face (though not everybody shared his assessment). Mackenzie Alston pointed out that many of the voluntary information and programs intended to remedy the problems end up with only those already motivated and interested attending. Lisa Cook pointed out that out of all the top econ programs, one – Berkeley – has accounted for a disproportionate share (maybe 40%?) of Black econ Ph.D.s and perhaps other departments could find out what they’re doing. All departments and colleagues should be aware of the AEA’s Best Practices for Building a More Diverse, Inclusive, and Productive Profession resources.
  • EGAP is offering $10,000 grants (deadline Dec 15) to scholars from the Global South for studying either
    1. the role of political conditions in enabling or preventing effective societal responses to the COVID-19 pandemic;
      or
    2. the way the COVID-19 pandemic, and its associated economic, social, and psychological stresses, is affecting different dimensions of elections around the globe.
  • IPA”s Peace and Recovery Program is offering a variety of kinds of funding, including for pilots and early career scholar, for different kinds of research around
    • Reducing violence and promoting peace
    • Reducing “fragility” (i.e. fostering state capability and institutions of decision-making)
    • Preventing, coping with, and recovering from crises, including COVID-19
    • Addressing homicide in Latin America and the Caribbean

Application details, guiding principles (explaining what they’re looking for in an application), previously funded projects, and more from Chris Blattman the academic lead for the program. Deadline Nov 20th.

  • And have we passed the peak? (don’t read down in the thread)

 

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

Medellin, Colombia

Medellin, Colombia

  • New results from my colleagues in Colombia with Chris Blattman, David Cerero,  Gustavo Duncan, Sebastian Hernandez, Benjamin Lessing, Juan F. Martínez, Juan Pablo Mesa-Mejía, Helena Montoya, and Santiago Tobón find the sensationalized headlines from early in the COVID days about gangs enforcing quarantine don’t hold up, at least in Medellin, where gangs do provide a lot neighborhood municipal services. Using existing research on gang governance, a survey of all low- and middle-income neighborhoods showed government was providing most public health and social services, except for in a few neighborhoods. (I summarize in a thread here).
  • Chris just gave a talk on the ongoing project on how and why gangs function like governments, it’s online here (if position isn’t preserved in this link it starts at the 2 hour mark:

  • The Ugandan government has suspended GiveDirectly’s operation (which I believe was in conjunction with USAID), with a really weird-seeming accusation against an org with a lot of research and transparency:

[interim executive director of the National Bureau for NGOs, Stephen] Okello claimed that an investigation had found that GiveDirectly’s cash handouts were likely to make Ugandans lazy, promote idleness, domestic violence, dependency syndrome and tension within neighbouring villages. Okello also cast doubt on the source of GiveDirectly’s cash.

    • GiveDirectly response/update here
  • Jobs:
    • Michael Kremer’s looking for a deputy director for his new Development Innovation Lab at UChicago
    • IRC: a very cool initiative studying promotion of play-based education in several East African countries (with IPA and several other orgs) is looking for a senior education researcher (based in Kampala). And (separately) for a researcher in Nairobi or Kampala on a livelihoods project.
    • IPA has a new program on how COVID has affected women’s work and entrepreneurship, and is looking for a senior policy associate and policy manager in Dhaka and in Nairobi, respectively. Also in Dhaka, we’re looking for a consultant to work on consumer financial protection around digital financial services (And more IPA listings on our jobs page here)
    • RAships in micro (not dev I think), at UChicago Booth
  • Going back to the job on digital financial protection, the reason for that larger research agenda is things like cheap Chinese smartphones coming preinstalled with malware to steal money from users, and another story from Pakistan I can’t get to now about a mobile interface essentially designed to trick users into taking out loans against their salary.
  • Smithsonian recently had a cover story on the kingdom of Kush, 5,000 years ago in what’s now Sudan.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Some student-created infographic examples from the Communicating Economics website. 

  • Communicating Economics is a site with tools, tips, and videos of in-person college level lectures on, well, pretty much what the title says. It comes from the person behind Econ Films, whom I’ve worked with before and are very good at at what they do.
  • A Belgian court has cleared the way for the remains of the first Prime Minister of an independent Republic of Congo (now the DRC) to be returned to his family. In 1961 Patrice Lumumba had been in the job for three months when the Belgian government had him killed, along with two family members. And his “remains” consists of a tooth, because the Belgian authorities also ordered his body to be dissolved in acid. Longer story (for those with strong stomachs) here.
  • An interesting paper by Obie Porteous, analyzing 27,000 econ papers about Africa finds:

“45% of all economics journal articles and 65% of articles in the top five economics journals are about five countries accounting for just 16% of the continent’s population. I show that 91% of the variation in the number of articles across countries can be explained by a peacefulness index, the number of international tourist arrivals, having English as an official language, and population.”

The “big five” locations that dominate Western econ are Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Ghana, and Malawi. On Conversations with Tyler recently, Tyler Cowen asked Nathan Nunn about this (particularly as relates to RCTs). Nunn responded that it’s very difficult to set up a research infrastructure, but once it’s there, it’s hard to go somewhere new and start again, and admitted that even though he doesn’t do RCTs he’s fallen into the same pattern.

  • A cool-looking paper from Agyei-Holmes, Buehren, Goldstein, Osei, Osei-Akoto, & Udry looks at a land titling program in Ghana (I know, see above, but to be fair, I know that at least Udry’s been doing research in Ghana for 30 years, and two of the authors are at Ghanaian institutions). The paper looks at how giving formal ownership to farmers increased their investments into their land and agricultural output. Except that it did the opposite – interestingly, when people got titles to the land, the value of the land increased and the owners, particularly women, shifted to other types of work, and business profits went up.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

Planet Money’s new resource for educators pairs podcast episodes with lesson plans, cataloged by topic.

 

  • It’s a big week for findings from cash studies including: publication of Chris’s study with Fiala and Martinez showing cash benefitted Ugandan participants, but by 9 years later the control group had caught up; Universal Basic Income in Kenya buffered against hard times when COVID and the agricultural lean season hit simultaneously; and a head-to-head-comparison between cash and an employment training program that found neither boosted employment, but cash was more effective at boosting economic outcomes. I summarize and link to them in this thread.
    • On that last one (comparing a traditional program to cash), some nice reflections here on how early studies make it easier for government agencies like USAID to take a chance on a new idea, and why a traditional before-and-after USAID evaluation led to a different conclusion than an RCT. Also, more detailed tweetstorm from study co-author Andrew Zeitlin here.
    • As it happens, all the data for all these studies was collected by my IPA colleagues in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, and while it’s easy to boil the finding down to a quick phrase, each represents thousands of hours of work behind the scenes, like this example.
  • Rohini Pande has a short and very readable article in Science arguing for an increased role in development research for finding ways to help the voices of the poor be heard in the democratic process and encouraging governments to be responsive to their needs. (h/t Michael Eddy)
  • A side effect of seminars going online is giving more people access to see them, and the upcoming CEPR Virtual Dev Seminar series looks great, with all-star presenters like Professor Pande above, and Oriana Bandiera
  • ICYMI, Planet Money’s had a summer school series where they revisit classic episodes explaining basic principles of econ with Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. The image above comes from a new teaching resource on a special site – they’ve organized 30 episodes on 20 topics along with lesson plans. It also has a “read along” feature for students to read the transcript while listening. I recommend sharing this teaching resource with anybody you know teaching high school or college econ concepts, basically they’ve already planned out an intro class.
  • David Evans and Amina Mendez Acosta have a very short and digestible summary of lessons from 140 education studies in Africa.
  • An update on the finding that the Heckman Curve (the idea that earlier interventions in childhood are more cost effective), doesn’t appear to be the case, according to a more comprehensive assessment of programs from Washington State (full academic paper). This should be encouraging that there can be cost-effective interventions for kids at all ages.
  • If you’re studying land tenure or government expropriation of agricultural land, the case of Black farmers in the United States is a good example. A combination of explicit violence, informal discrimination (as I understand it, such as a local bank “losing” a mortgage payment), and outright government discrimination, such as the USDA denying agricultural loans to black farmers (and even when they won a lawsuit, taking 11 years to pay out), reduced the amount of land farmed by Black farmers in the US by 90% between 1910 and 1997 according to this article.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Science Cover

  • There’s a lot of basic social science documenting humanity’s flaws, biases, and injustices, but less on fixes. The cover of the new issue of Science today features Salma Mousa’s paper using an experiment in post-ISIS Iraq to promote reconciliation between persecuted Christians and their Muslim neighbors (plain language summary here). Using contact theory, she randomly assigned Muslim players to some teams in a Christian soccer league and found it improved social cohesion, but changed attitudes extended only to Muslims in the league, not beyond. Summary here, explanatory thread by editor Tage Rai, and commentary from Betsy Levy Paluck and Chelsey Clark explaining the significance of the work.
    • She worked contemporaneously and shared ideas with Matt Lowe, who mixed cricket teams across caste in India with similarly positive outcomes (h/t Seema Jayachandran for the reminder). Chris Blattman called them two of the best conflict-related papers of recent years.
  • A conversation between Amartya Sen, Angus Deaton, and Tim Besley on economics and morals, and also reminiscing (video here).
  • Looks like the WHO is creating a Nudge Unit for health (closest explanation I could find is this job posting that already passed)
  • Speaking of jobs, Arifu, a Nairobi-based mobile information sharing platform, has a few open, including for a researcher (BA/MA level) to do A/B testing and (eventually) impact evals.
  • Alaka Holla, Billy Jack, and Owen Ozier have created a free edX class: Impact Evaluation Methods with Applications in Low- and Middle-Income Countries. It seems like it would be particularly helpful for those in schools, or countries, without access to the classes for learning methods basics, so please share widely.
  • Podcasts:
    • Conversations with Tyler with Nathan Nunn (Apple) was really good, about economic history and why culture is undervalued in development, even though it’s hard to measure. An interesting tidbit at the end is when he reflects on growing up and being able to work your way up from working class in Canada vs. the U.S.
    • Rough Translation (Apple) on the Venezuelan anti-corruption bureaucrat turned Ecuadorian lumberjack who led a group of Venezuelan refugees *walking* back to Venezuela.
    • The Hidden Curriculum is a new podcast (Apple), on what you should know about going through econ grad school
  • I shared some tips on looking at Ph.D. programs and considering non-academic careers (psych in my case, but hopefully these are general enough).
  • A clever visual investigative journalism explainer on how Mauritius became a center for corporate tax dodging in Africa.
  • 60 Decibels has a really nice interactive visualization of their results (with qual quotes), on the impact of COVID in rural Kenya.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

Claudia Goldin charts a century of women in the workforce

  • I’ve heard these days in medicine there’s a glut of papers that are all essentially “[thing I was doing already] + in the time of COVID,” which seems like is true of all fields now. The German Development Institute for Evaluation (DEval) has a helpful roundup of several useful new hubs for evidence, research, and methodology resources for dev/social science.
  • A few weeks ago I saw someone say something like “good thing economics is so status driven and hierarchical, at least someone gets to publish nulls.” Heres’s a nice thread of responses to Pia Raffler’s request for resources on showing (and publishing) null results.
  • Stefano DellaVigna and Elizabeth Linos compare the size of effects in academic trials of nudges, to 126 RCTs conducted by Nudge Unit trials in the practical world:

    “In papers published in academic journals, the average impact of a nudge is very large – an 8.7 percentage point take-up effect, a 33.5% increase over the average control. In the Nudge Unit trials, the average impact is still sizable and highly statistically significant, but smaller at 1.4 percentage points, an 8.1% increase.”

    They find publication bias and statistical power account for the difference (perhaps some nudge researchers can read the responses above for how to publish disappointing findings). Then using forecasts, they find academics overestimate the effects an intervention will have, while Nudge Unit practitioners are accurate.

  • How are you at forecasting? A new prediction platform spearheaded by DellaVigna and Eva Vivalt lets anybody sign up to predict the outcomes of several trials.
  • This is why we can’t have nice (or cheaper) things. The Times has an exposé of an institute at George Mason Law School funded by big tech companies who happen to be under regulatory scrutiny (h/t Florian Ederer.) The institute they fund trains regulators in the school of economic thought that the best kind of regulation is as little as possible. It follows the model of a judge training institute that does the same thing, and has been shown to influences judges to rule in favor of mergers. Planet Money had a couple of really good episodes explaining why, for example, we have only a few big telecom companies. It comes back to Robert Bork (Apple) taking an econ class at UChicago in the 70’s when he was in law school, and writing a book for the law field explaining that economics says to leave markets alone. There’s another good episode (Apple) on what this means for the big tech companies today like Google and Facebook. In summary, your cable and cell phone bills are so high because a dude took an econ class in the 70’s, and that’s the butterfly effect.
    • For a counterexample, see Michael Lewis’ podcast episode “Baby Judge School,” which trains judges to be aware of their own biases and how to counteract them more effectively (Apple).
  • An uncomfortable truth is that academics are big polluters, through conferences and other kinds of travel, but many of us are figuring out how to accomplish similar academic events without the travel these days. Here’s a really interesting article on how to de-carbonize conference travel, through simple things like holding them in more central locations, and having simultaneous regional hub meetings that connect to one another digitally. One crazy statistic, they calculated the carbon from travel for one major scientific conference and found on average it was “about 3 tonnes per scientist, or the average weekly emissions of the city of Edinburgh, UK.”
  • Happily the NBER Summer Institute this week was online and therefore open to far more people. Claudia Goldin gives the Martin Feldstein lecture at NBER Summer Institute on women’s career progress over a century.  “Tammy Duckworth is the first senator … to bring a baby into an active session of Congress, though many would say there have been babies in Congress before that time”

 

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

 

  • Cool panel on Wednesday, now that schools have gone remote, how to assess remotely if kids are learning.
  • And another on Thursday including Anne Karing of Princeton, Jonathan Robinson from UC Santa Cruz, presenting new data on covid impacts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Malawi
  • IPA’s Research Methods Initiative has a call for proposals, due July 31st, with $10k for methodology studies (typically an add-on to an existing study).
  • University of Cape Town economist Grieve Chelwa has been critical of RCTs in the past so my colleague and I were braced for his online discussion at Africa is a Country (dropping you in after 40ish min of football talk but feel free to rewind for that). But honestly we walked away both saying he was right, and it was a really good conversation. (Paraphrasing), he said something like as a student in Zambia he read plenty of great research by Zambian economists but somehow the only recognized repository of authoritative information on the Zambian economy is in the Journal of Development Economics. Few African economists are represented on the editorial boards of the journals where research on African economies are published. The dynamic is different he feels like in economic policy––where local officials defer to outside authorities from abroad––from health policy, where he sees more reliance on local experts.
  • On the Brookings Blog, macroeconomist Célestin Monga describes being appointed as a Senior Economist at the World Bank and having a European country’s finance minister he was supposed to work with refused to believe a Cameroonian economist could be competent. But he goes deeper to explain how a dynamic, in which country officials have to run proposals by donors from far away who are doing their best to guess what’s best for the country, leads to a vicious cycle of the wrong questions being asked and wrong data collected, and back into flawed decisions.
  • An article in DevEx wonders if the north-south dynamic in health policy led to the same advice being given to wealthy and low-income countries regardless of it was appropriate for the latter.
  • NBER Summer Institute’s dev sessions will be streamed Mon & Tues afternoons (Eastern U.S. time), details here.
  • Podcasts:
    • Planet Money’s doing a “summer school” teaching some basics of economics for those without a background in it. Here’s Episode 1 (Apple) with Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers on choice.
    • Tyler Cowen interviews Clark Medal winner Melissa Dell (Apple) about how historical circumstances from long ago can affect countries’ development today. I was really amazed by all the history she brings to bear (reminded me of the episode with John McWhorter (Apple) which combined a lot of history with linguistics).
    • Before Professor Dell won the Clark medal, she won the AEA CSWEP Elaine Bennett Research Prize Talk in 2018 and reflected on the bigger picture questions in her research.
  • I also really liked Cowen’s interview with former prosecutor and law professor Rachel Harmon (Apple) about policing reform. She had a lot of really thoughtful answers and a quality I really respect in a guest, declining to speculate on areas outside her expertise.

And thanks to AI and natural language processing, you don’t have to wait for the next Tyler Cowen interview

 

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

Professor Lisa Cook explains that black and white inventors put in equivalent numbers of patent applications once in 1899, and never again. 

  • First, a great webinar by Professor Lisa Cook, former economic advisor to President Obama, among many other accomplishments, on how lynchings, violence, and discrimination caused African-American inventions (measured by patent applications) to peak in 1899 and never recover. Here’s the video and slides, but for a fast summary, I did my best to live tweet it. She covered a lot of ground, but some parts that stuck with me in particular:
    • The number of “missing” patents never filed because of the decreased numbers is on the order of the contribution of a medium-sized European country. It’s hard to imagine what innovations and prosperity we’ve all missed out on.
    • Prof Cook mentioned in passing that a cousin helped found a town in North Carolina intended as a safe place for African-Americans to live and prosper without harassment. The story of Soul City, NC is fascinating.
    • The most compelling part of the story wasn’t even in the webinar. It was her decade-long uphill battle to get the paper published, and what it tells us about the field of economics, which she explains to Planet Money’s The Indicator (Apple).
  • The NYTimes has a piece explaining the problems with the culture of economics, and Dania Francis & Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman offer three tips for the field in Newsweek
  • The Sadie Collective has recommendations for what institutions and individuals in the field can do better.
  • The best piece I’ve read on how subtle assumptions about race get absorbed into economists’ reasoning is this from Professor William Spriggs.
  • How the field got to be the way it is is a bit easier to understand if you read this horrible piece by George Stigler in 1962: The Problem of the Negro.

If you haven’t seen it yet, this was a great explanation for the general US culture:

  • Kimberly Jones’ Monopoly game metaphor reminds me of this Howard French brilliant deconstruction of a UK historian’s book (gated, sorry) about African history.  French shows that Europeans destroyed sophisticated civilizations and hollowed out countries’ populations for hundreds of years by dragging away the workforce, and today cast about for roundabout theories for why they’re “underdeveloped” 
  • I’m side-eyeing historians, but also hard to ignore the asymmetry in where development economists’ ideas come from, and the assumption that countries where the rich people are also must know how to get rich.
    Along those lines, here’s a great piece by Francesco Loiacono, Mariajose Silva-Vargas, & Apollo Tumusiime (written before the pandemic) about how research designs can be more sensitive and less biased by the views of the researchers (better informed consent, for example, and not assuming their programs happen in a vacuum, or realizing that local politicians may swoop in and take credit for cash transfers). (h/t David McKenzie’s links)
  • Today, I learned that the UK’s abolition of slavery was accomplished through paying the slaveowners for their lost “property,” to the tune of today’s $17 Billion (and requiring an additional 5 years of unpaid labor, which I feel like there’s a name for…) British taxpayers just finished paying back that borrowed money in 2015, which means that descendants of slaves have been paying back their own ancestors’ slavemasters.
  • Jennifer Doleac put together a series of flash webinars on policing research, more info here.
  • A series of simple police reform ideas in this article and tweet thread on how to fix many policing problems by looking at financial incentives, moving the benefit of the “taxes” levied disproportionally on the poor by the criminal justice system away from the local municipalities (revenues from fines, seized assets, and the like) and redistributing them at the state level, prioritizing the poor.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

  • Stanford Political Scientist Hakeem Jefferson hosted a great conversation with a number of scholars on race and the criminal justice system
  • The readings mentioned are assembled in this Dropbox folder and thread, and the Stanford Daily summarized the conversation.
  • A couple of points that jumped out at me were what counts as research/evidence in academic research circles (it seems common for scholars of the black experience to face skepticism, or the view that its a specific niche topic).
    At the same time, a lot of sloppy (or fundamentally flawed) research on policing or other areas of policy makes it through peer review and gets a lot of public attention. And just like COVID, we might be about to be deluged with a huge wave of hasty research papers on race and everything under the sun from well-intentioned researchers new to the area.
  • Or to put it more succinctly:

  • Here’s a Jennifer Doloeac thread on evaluations of specific policy interventions around policing.
    • I think I caught part of a discussion wondering if these RCT-able micro policy interventions miss the point (the policies that lead to police abuses, and massive racial disparities in so many social outcomes are much larger, and approaches looking at one tiny tweak divert our attention from them. It seemed reminiscent of the RCT debate around research priorities in dev econ a bit – global poverty is so massive a problem – in other words, it’s great that your youth empowerment program is RCT-able (at one place at one particular point in time) and makes for a fine study, but is it really going to make a dent in the bigger problems, even if it works?
      I’ll cop-out by saying both sides have a point. We should absolutely be solving the big problems, but if we have a choice of small programs that are going to be implemented anyway – be they youth empowerment or police body cams – it seems at least helpful to weed out the ones that don’t work. But not at that cost of solving the big picture problems.
  • The Campaign Zero site has a lot of good research findings turned into practical advice, along with this thread
  • IPA’s thread on Black Lives Matter, includes advice for researchers from Ph.D. student Angeline Dukes for what Black students, RAs, and junior colleagues might be experiencing and how to help; and also helpful thoughts and links from economist Lisa Cook on race and the field of economics. Also, here’s advice for leadership of any organization (h/t my colleague Bethany Park).
  • Public health prof Gregg Gonsalves addresses the uncomfortable question of won’t the protests spread COVID? He asks, compared to what, with up to 100,000 premature African-American deaths every year under current conditions. This reminds me of sort of a status-quo type bias, where people only consider the costs of changing, the costs of the current situation seem invisible.
  • This was good, African observers commenting on the U.S. situation.
  • Yale School of Management’s Rodrigo Canales has some helpful and optimistic views of how to think about police reform based on his work in Mexico (RCT-based).
  • The new Ezra Klein Show (Apple) episode “Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful” was great and lives up to its title. Coates was surprised to hear that his father, who lived through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, say the scope of the current protests would have been as unimaginable to activists of the 60s, as the marches of the 60s to people from the 1800’s. Both Klein and Coates have a lot of good ideas, and Coates offers some book recommendations (h/t Dina Pomeranz)
  • An onboarding into dev econ, especially for students from abroad or different backgrounds, might be MIT’s MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Development Policy. This term just started, but you can join and register through July 1.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

Coronavirus patient, comedian Noam Shuster, found herself at the center of an accidental social experiment profiled on the Rough Translation podcast

This was also a good reminder about the usual script when it comes to how viruses play out in poor vs. rich countries:

  • The Economist has a nice profile of Princeton economist Leonard Wantchekon, who escaped from being a political prisoner in Benin, and went on to found the African School of Economics there to make top notch econ training more accessible. But you can read his story in his own words: He’s posted the introduction and chapter 7 of his book here.
    • One of the points made in the Economist profile about the school is that talent is found all over, opportunity is not. It’s a helpful reminder that if you’re an econ researcher who relies on talented staff in another country for data collection (even if your communication goes through an American RA), a helpful thing to do is set aside some time to talk to them about their career goals and how you can help.
  • Dave Evans pioneers a YouTube paper “reaction video” format, walking the viewer through a paper – in this case, on refugee child education. And today he has a “movie trailer“-style one explaining how advance market commitments for vaccines work.
  • A good podcast from Rough Translation: Hotel Corona (Apple) about how a hotel leased to the Israeli government for recovering Corona patients became a nation-captivating social experiment and unwitting reality show.

 

Click through for this thread of the best historical U.S. Congressional facial hair, you won’t be sorry.

 

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

  • Last week I mentioned the new COVID research RECOVR hub, which was still in development. This week it’s been launched officially, to help development researchers share information about ongoing studies, survey instruments, and funding opportunities. If you are doing related work, please share or have a look at what other researchers are doing so we can build on one another’s work.
  • A great initiative from the Busara Center, “Give More Tomorrow,”  lets better-off Kenyans pledge to give the money from their new tax breaks to the poor during this crisis, but it’s not limited to Kenyans. Anybody can use the Busara pledge on their site for their tax refund or stimulus check as well and donate to Kenyans in crisis via GiveDirectly.
  • Congrats to Penn’s Sharon Wolf & Jere R. Behrman, NYU’s Larry Aber, and IPA Ghana’s Edward Tsinigo, on winning the Society for Research on Early Childhood Education’s 2019 paper of the year, about an experimental program to improve preschool education in Ghana by getting teachers to move from a memorization and spitback style of teaching to an inquiry and social one. It’s also the subject of one of my favorite podcast episodes (Apple) from NPR’s Rough Translation, because they spend most of the time talking to teachers and families to explain why it didn’t go according to plan.
  • Congratulations to Melissa Dell for winning the Clark Medal for her work on economic history and development.
  • Michael Kremer’s seminar at Princeton about financing a COVID vaccine is below (slides here, Michael’s slides start at p13 of the PDF)). He has a paper from last fall about his work on the financing the pneumonia vaccine for poor countries here & here’s a plain language discussion from Scientific American.

(if the video is missing/broken, check the Princeton Economics YouTube channel)

To shore up confidence beforehand I asked my lighting sensei, Tom Ford, for some tips and he kindly sent these instructions, which you all are welcome to use:

“Put the computer up on a stack of books so the camera is slightly higher than your head. Say, about the top of your head. And then point it down into your eyes. Then take a tall lamp and set it next to the computer on the side of your face you feel is best. The lamp should be in line with and slightly behind the computer so the light falls nicely on your face. Then put a piece of white paper or a white tablecloth on the table you are sitting at but make sure it can’t be seen in the frame. It will give you a bit of fill and bounce. And lots of powder, et voilà!”

or head into your Zoom settings:

Image

Send me your online meeting tips and I’ll post ’em. Have a good weekend everybody.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

AAS inductees

  • First some good news – congratulations to development economist and dewormer Ted Miguel, social psychologist of diversity and justice Jennifer Richeson, gynecologist and Nobel laureate, Denis Mukwege of the DRC, and the other newly elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
  • For researchers working on (or interested in working on) COVID in low- and middle-income countries: to facilitate collaboration, with support from the Gates Foundation, IPA, with J-PAL, CEGA, the IGC, CGD, Northwestern’s Global Poverty Research Lab, & Yale’s Y-RISE, are going to launch a COVID research hub next week listing ongoing research studies (with data & results when ready), funding opportunities, and survey research instruments. If you or anyone you know is working on a COVID project in development, please submit your instruments from the link there so the community can share compatible research tools and coordinate work. And please share with your colleagues!
  • Realizing the situation of the job market, IPA’s Peace and Recovery program, led academically by Chris Blattman, is offering a new one-year postdoc related to peace, violence, fragility, and recovery, suitable for someone from econ, political science, psych or related training.
  • Massive crop-eating locust swarms are heading back to East Africa, and much bigger than before, while COVID has disrupted the supply chain for pesticides.
  • David’s Dev Impact links today include helpful ones on new COVID papers and funding for COVID research.
  • A couple of interesting papers using cell phone data with current relevance:
    • A new paper from Nicolas Ajzenman, Tiago Cavalcanti, & Daniel Da Mata looks at a country highly politically divided where a President who has a questionable relationship with science minimized the COVID threat in early days and find words matter. They find that after Brazilian president Bolsonaro gave speeches minimizing the importance of social distancing, people in municipalities where he had strong support did less social distancing.
    • Sveta Milusheva uses 15 billion mobile phone records in Senegal to track movement from areas with more malaria cases to areas with fewer, and matches it up with data showing an accordant rise in new infections at the destinations. She estimates:

“an infected traveler contributes to 1.7 additional cases reported in the health facility at the traveler’s destination. This paper develops a simulation-based policy tool that uses mobile phone data to inform strategic targeting of travelers based on their origins and destinations. The simulations suggest that targeting informed by mobile phone data could reduce the caseload by 50 percent more than current strategies that rely only on previous incidence.”

  • A new paper estimates the return on investment for personal protective equipment for community health workers in low and middle-income countries at $241.1 billion or 6,918% (h/t Grant Gordon). In my brief glance that’s just the immediate ROI; during the  Ebola outbreak, researchers estimated the deaths of healthcare workers would lead to more child and maternal deaths even after the outbreak (h/t Dave Evans)
  • If you’re having weird or vivid dreams these days, it’s not just you (h/t Osman Siddiqi)

And it’s not your imagination, all commercials are alike these days (h/t David Batcheck)

 

 

IPA’s weekly links

Online Census form

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

  • Remember to fill out your U.S. Census form if you got a mailing! Of course accurate counts are important for apportioning leadership and federal resources, but more importantly (as someone else pointed out) so that researchers 80 years from now looking at historical trends won’t pull out their hair in frustration of the lost 2020 census data the same way ones today do about the 1890 census data fire.
  • The Dev Impact blog had a pair of postings for research in the time of COVID-19. First, how your interventions and methods will have to change in the times of COVID-19, and dilemmas for researchers when your study is interrupted and what to do about them, which goes into specific past examples of how researchers adjusted when something unexpected happened to still get a useful study when things didn’t go according to plan.
  • I spoke with Oeindrila Dube of the University of Chicago about her new papers about health systems in Sierra Leone and Ebola, and the implications for COVID-19. The work, with Darin Christensen, Johannes Haushofer, Bilal Siddiqi, and Maarten Voors, started out as an evaluation of two interventions to improve health clinics, specifically by building trust and communication with the communities they served. Ebola hit after their study ended, but recall that one big barrier then given all the fear and stigma was getting people to come forward to get tested and treated. The researchers later matched up location-specific data to the areas where their programs had been and found that in the communities with the programs, more people came forward to get tested and treated. Two takeaways were how a social intervention helped save lives when a disease hit, and also how researchers can use recent or ongoing studies to inform a crisis response.
  • As the crisis rips into economies CGAP has a nice collection of lessons from previous studies on how financial tools can help the poor during crises (and you can contribute more there if you know of relevant work).
  • Martin Ravallion has a really helpful collection of thoughts on the many ways COVID might affect low-income countries and what people should be thinking about.
  • Mushfiq Mobarak talks in more detail about fighting the virus in Bangladesh and other low-income countries, and why we can’t copy and paste prevention strategies or even assumptions about spreading patterns from high-income countries to low-income countries. He explains new data collection efforts underway and how strategies will have to be developed that are location-appropriate.
  • South Africa appears to have cracked down, both more ruthlessly and effectively than many countries, including sending police out to arrest or just beat people violating quarantine. (h/t W. Gyude Moore, former Liberian Minister of Public Works and current Visiting Fellow at the Center for Global Development, who’s definitely worth a follow if you’re on twitter)
  • An ultra-Orthodox town in Israel supposedly went from a corona hotspot to no new cases by putting in stricter-than-required behavioral restrictions supported by local religious figures, but also following the “make it easy” rule so people wouldn’t have to be outside. The supermarket allowed people to submit a grocery list to a 24-hour hotline and their groceries would be delivered, and books and toys were delivered to families inside.
  • A helpful thread of African writers on COVID-19 there (h/t Rachel Strohm, who’s always sharing useful information)

And for some non virus breaks:

  • I really enjoyed this Tyler Cowen podcast (Apple/iTunes) with linguist John McWhorter, who just seems like a store of so much knowledge (reinforcing my opinion that linguistics is the social science that learns the most from other subfields)
  • For a cheap read and an occasional chuckle, marketing professor and humor researcher Peter McGraw, a friend of mine, has a new general audience book trying to distill wisdom from comedians for the workplace. He tries to dissect different types of jokes and what makes ideas unexpected, with the help of a comedian. One creativity exercise he says he sometimes uses in consulting is ‘Sh*tstorming” – brainstorming, but trying to come up with the worst ideas possible. He says it often loosens up people to be less inhibited, and occasionally generates good ideas. Anyway, the electronic version of the book is a buck on Amazon until Tuesday.
  • This article asserts the real problem behind the toilet paper shortages isn’t runs on stores, it’s that national usage has shifted abruptly from at workplaces, schools, and businesses to home. The problem is that manufacturers make very different types of toilet paper for each (even the size and shape of the rolls), and with the market experiencing so much movement, the industry has to quickly adjust supply chains on the back end.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • It’s a little tricky to write links when it feels like things are changing hourly. Here’s the main message to keep in mind for the research community – you can do more than idle your projects. COVID-19 will affect every aspect of development, health, education, entrepreneurship, mobile money, cash transfers, political systems and trust in authority.
    But, if you have a research expertise in some area of development, now’s the time to use it, not in three years to get a good retrospective paper. The advantage we have is that (as far as we know), it hasn’t hit the Southern Hemisphere badly yet, and we still have a shot at slowing or containing it there. The bad news is that, as far as I can tell, research orgs aren’t well-positioned to anticipate this. Specifically – grants tied to a specific project are good for getting that project done, but when work is suspended, as the majority of face-to-face research will be (or is already) those research abilities should be redirected to fighting COVID and mitigating its impacts.
  • Some funders have committed to allowing resources to be redirected, with the Philanthropy Pledge 2020 led by the Ford Foundation, but most of the signatories (last I checked) were domestic U.S. and I haven’t seen as many international ones coalesce in the same way. We do list several leaders here, but the field needs to move faster.
  • To that end, IPA’s adapting it’s resources across 22 countries to fight it, and we’ll be doing matchmaking between what countries need, what funders are willing to support, and researchers soon, please reach out to the email addresses there if you can be involved:
    • Researchers, implementers, and funders can contact our Peace and Recovery team who’s leading our internal effort [email protected]
    • We’re also also exploring partnerships to launch a competitive fund for COVID response research there, if you can help with that email [email protected]
  • A crucial mindset for academics will be not “how can I track the effects to write about what happened later” but “what can I do to help mitigate the effects before they happen?” which may be a different type of data work than you’re used to. Departments should also allow enough flexibility to count this kind of work toward advancement as well.
  • Tavneet Suri is running a webinar discussing switching the Kenya Universal Basic Income RCT survey to phone interviews, and best practices in phone surveys tomorrow at 9 Eastern
  • Dina generously points out cash transfers aren’t just for governments:
  • And GiveDirectly is taking donations for low-income Americans likely to be hit by the virus fallout.
  • The map at the top comes from Ugo Gentilini, who has done an impressive and fast review of 45 countries’ social protection measures in response to COVID (typically cash transfers). As of his review, all regions of the world were represented, except Africa.
  • A consortium of researchers have a behavioral responses to COVID-19 survey in 35 languages to take http://www.covid19-survey.org/


    And, if you haven’t seen it – necessity is the mother of invention-

FWIW, I’m seeing the quarantine affect people in different and unexpected ways. I don’t have a solution, but I did talk to someone in Hong Kong, which is about 8 weeks ahead of us, and she said they’d settled into a routine there. So if they’re any guide it’ll be weird for a while, and then we’ll get used to it, but in the meantime, it’s weird for everybody, not just you.

Here’s a live cam of underwater penguins (and without human visitors in the building, Chicago’s aquarium let the penguins out to walk around)

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

Thanks for being patient while the links were on hiatus, we’re back!

  • COVID-19 is obviously on everybody’s mind. For the dev crowd, let’s remember that right now travel from US/Europe to the Southern hemisphere might spread the disease to vulnerable places with much weaker health systems.
    • I apologize for not having it handy, but there was a good thread about how the mental model of the poor countries being the source of diseases may have contributed to U.N. troops bringing cholera to Haiti and discharging their waste into drinking water.
    • The Global Dispatches (formerly UN Dispatch I think) podcast is always very informative. Host Mark Leon Goldberg spoke with Johns Hopkins professor Paul Spiegel who is currently modeling how an outbreak would spread in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh if brought there by outsiders (Apple, transcript here). One aspect of thinking about an outbreak among refugees is the pressure host governments will have to use limited health resources on the native-born population before refugees.
  • How can researchers help? Three suggestions from IPA’s perspective
    • IPA’s Peace and Recovery Program has announced grants of (up to) $50k available off cycle (i.e. now) to study emergency responses in low and middle-income countries, including COVID-19 and is accepting proposals. Please share with colleagues! (and retweet here)
    • When the 2014 Ebola outbreak happened, many research projects were affected, but researchers adapted to integrate questions about Ebola into their research projects. Here’s a great brand new (updated today!) paper from Christensen, Dube, Haushofer, Siddiqi, & Voors, who already had an RCT in progress in Sierra Leone testing if two social accountability interventions improved health care quality in clinics. When the Ebola outbreak hit they adapted their study to incorporate it and found that giving status awards to nurses and community-monitoring of health clinics improved the perceived quality of health care and health care workers. This in turn appears to have led more people to come forward to be tested and treated for Ebola, saving lives.
    • Another group of researchers reactivated a network of phone-based monitoring of food prices from a previous study to monitor prices and potential shortages in areas that were cut off, and quickly fed that back to government and relief agencies so they could move resources into place. If there is an outbreak (or danger of one), do you have data that might help local authorities plan for how to use resources?
  • And if travel is cancelled, here’s some experience on holding a “virtual conference”
    • For professors & teachers thinking about transitioning to streaming classes, one professor was recently surprised to learn several of her students didn’t have wi-fi at home, so remember to be sensitive to individuals’ circumstances (sharing slides in advance and using a service that includes a call-in number). For students who need a written interface I’ve heard that Google Hangouts’ live captioning is pretty good (but haven’t experimented extensively. Make sure you don’t have a Swedish accent though).
  • International Women’s Day is on Sunday:
  • And a pretty remarkable story by Greta Thunberg’s mom, excerpted from a new book.

IPA’s weekly links

Liberia education RCT results

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • A few years ago, Liberia, whose educational system has been troubled to say the least, tried an experiment. In the face of under-resourced and underperforming public schools, they wondered if private education providers could run public schools better than the government was? The country announced that it was going to outsource the whole country’s schools to one American company, but after public outcry the plan was scaled back to pilot and included a randomized evaluation with three private and five non-profit school operators running different test schools.
    Now the three-year evaluation results, from Mauricio Romero and Justin Sandefur (conducted with my IPA colleagues in Liberia), are out: short summary, 3ish page brief & full paper. On average, results were not stunning (students from the privately-run schools read about 3 words a minute more in English after 3 years than their peers in the business-as-usual public schools), and though corporal punishment went down a bit, sexual abuse of children did not.
    Bridge International Academies, the company originally slated to run the whole country’s schools, had the largest number of schools in the pilot. It achieved on par results by kicking out several hundred students and the majority of teachers – leading school dropout rates to increase by nearly half over three years – and also cost more than twice the per pupil cost of the next most expensive operator. Justin summarizes the whole thing in a helpful twitter thread here. Bridge’s head of research responded here arguing as far as I can tell, that if you only look at the third of the students who stayed in their schools, their results look much better.
    On the other hand, if you look across operators, some clearly did better than others, which is also encouraging. At least to me it suggests the model might be possible under the right circumstances. As always, the devil’s in the details. Quartz reports on it here.
  • World Development quickly put together a special symposium issue on RCTs in development with lots of interesting-looking perspectives (gated unfortunately), but editor Arun Agrawal gives helpful single tweet summaries of each one in this thread.
  • Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, the founder of BRAC, the world’s largest NGO, and a pioneer in the field, has passed away.
  • Ugo Gentilini had over a thousand papers this year in his weekly social protection links, he summarizes his favorites in 10 categories (e.g., cash, gender, crime)
  • Great podcasts:
    • Last week I talked about the government putting up hurdles for the poor getting food stamps and school lunches. Georgetown’s Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan have a whole book on “administrative burdens,” how governments (often states) put up unnecessary bureaucracy to prevent people from getting benefits they’re entitled to, often as a way around doing it legislatively (behavioral economists think of this as the opposite of a nudge, “sludge.”) Some of their work is inspired by the revelations they experienced trying to get benefits for their disabled daughter. They had a great conversation on The Weeds, but make sure you take your blood pressure medication first and there’s nothing breakable nearby. (Although a positive update, soon after that came out, Kentucky’s governor ended that state’s Medicaid work requirement)
    • Tyler Cowen has great interviews with Esther Duflo (Apple), and Samantha Power (Apple)
    • The Indicator has Lisa D. Cook and Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman talking about how economics excludes black women (Apple), here’s their NYTimes op-ed about it.
  • Some impressive data journalism from the NYTimes, who received a data set with 50 billion cell phone locations, tracked by a private company. They were able to identify semi-public figures, like a senior Department of Defense official at the Women’s March on the National Mall. The point of the piece is that the collection and use of this data is largely unregulated.
  • This is probably the last links of the year (decade I guess?). Thanks again to everybody for reading, to Chris and to IPA for continuing to afford me the opportunity, and particularly to my colleague Cara Vu for editing them weekly. I’m looking forward to an informative 2020!

IPA’s weekly links

"Can you keep your medicaid in Arkansas 'game'"

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • There’s a new evaluation out of the Northern Ghana site of the famous expensive Millennium Villages project most associated with Jeff Sachs. I’m not an expert, but as I understand it, the theory is that an intensive big fix (building new institutions like hospitals and many other things at once) could fix the interdependent problems of poor areas.
    The thing is that Sachs insisted he knew it would work, and it didn’t need an independent evaluation, in fact threatening people who criticized the project’s inadequate evaluation, and yelling at a reporter (disclosure: she’s now my colleague) who asked for the full budget numbers.
    My understanding is that in addition to the outside funding Sachs brought, it required local government funding and free labor, so also came at a cost to the local region.
    DFID, the UK aid agency, disagreed and did insist on this evaluation, which finds “small or null” effects (I couldn’t find an ungated version but here’s the DFID report version)
  • It’s job market season, lots of good job market papers on the Development Impact Blog. In addition, two JMPs/JMC’s which caught my attention:
    • Moffii Odunowo has a couple really interesting papers, one thinking about the longer lasting impacts of women’s education in Nigeria using natural geographical variation in a 1970’s-era educational reform. Every additional year of school they got increased:
      “the probability of children completing primary school by 22 percent, and attending secondary school by 29 percent. I find that the effects are particularly pronounced for girls.“
    • One of her other papers also looks at the effects of exposure to Boko Haram attacks on children’s cognition:
      “Children exposed to terror attacks are 0.35 SDs shorter and lag in cognition by 0.18 SDs. The deficits are largest in children exposed to violence at younger ages. Mediation analysis shows that 6% of the effect on height is mediated by nutrition and parental investment can explain 14% of the effect on psychological development.“
      According to her website, she’s got an RCT and several other interesting projects in the works, which I’m looking forward to seeing.
    • Wayne Sandholtz blogs about his JMP, looking at electoral consequences of an existing Liberian school reform. As it happens, the program was being RCTed, and he ran a parallel study on voting and opinions. He found that parents of kids in the new schools responded to how well the school was doing with their voting, rewarding the incumbent if the new school was performing well, and punishing if it wasn’t.
  • Relevant for current U.S. announcements that the administration will take away SNAP food benefits for 700,000 poor adults, and school lunches from nearly a million children (some can reapply), is this brief from Ideas42 on work requirements for benefits. The evidence showed they don’t help and just put up barriers (see the “game” on page 14 to see if you’d be able to keep your Medicaid benefits with Arkansas’ barriers). I’ve never seen any evidence that punishing the poor out of poverty works. In fact, one of the themes of Abhijit Banerjee’s Nobel lecture was that the poor aren’t poor because they’re lazy. His donation to the Nobel Prize museum was bags sewn by women in Ghana from a study with my IPA colleagues showing that poor women who got more cash aid became more, not less, productive at work. Also see this part of his Nobel lecture, where he discusses findings from 7 countries where social welfare programs didn’t reduce work.
  • Rachel Strohm has a nice piece out about what people mean when they say being in “the field.” She concludes that it’s shorthand for geographic and power dynamics. I’ve noticed the same thing, and started just saying where I mean (the name of the place or “the study locations”)
  • Kenya’s new railway from the port has increased costs by nearly 50% for some shippers, due to the high fees needed to repay the Chinese backers of the project. Shippers are being required to use the new railway.
  • The Nobel lectures by Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer were all very watchable, but my favorite part is probably the fashion articles from India about the traditional clothing Banerjee and Duflo wore to the award. I’m guessing it’s the first fashion article about MIT economists.

IPA’s weekly links

Photo: Larry George II on Unsplash

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

  • For your travels this weekend I’ve put up some favorite podcast recommendations, plus some bonus reading, and kids’ podcasts. (Though they’re all potentially kids’ podcasts, in that when my kids misbehave in the back seat I threaten to put on an econ podcast and they shape up pretty quick.)
  • The Nathan Nunn article on rethinking economic development was very readable. He argues that instead of investing in development, rich countries could just stop doing things that harm poor countries, like punitive trade and immigration policies, poorly thought out development projects that cause unintended consequences like exacerbating conflict, and academic research that’s blind to the country context. The latter includes few development economists from the countries being studied in the fields’ mainstream, and journals rejecting running the similar evaluations in a different country, if we already know results from one place.
  • On the second, unintended consequences, Jeff Bloem kicked off the series of Dev Impact Blog’s job market candidates blogging their job market papers with a really interesting one. He finds the Dodd-Frank act trying to curb conflict minerals, roughly doubled conflicts in the DRC, and the conflicts continued even after the U.S. suspended those provisions.
    • Side note: David McKenzie says a lot of emails from the World Bank are going to spam boxes, and we’ve found the same at IPA, so if you subscribe to either of our email lists, please whitelist worldbank.org and poverty-action.org domains (you should be able to unsubscribe from both easily from within the emails if you don’t want them). You might also want to check your spam folder to see what else the algorithm is routing there.
  • My colleagues John Branch and Marina Gonzalez have a post on planning ahead to make sure your project (be it program or study) survive political transitions, based on experience in Mexico.
  • Non-academic jobs:
    • Most people know the International Rescue Committee as a great humanitarian aid org, but it also has a fantastic research group, who’s looking for a senior research director (Ph.D. level). Bonus, you’ll be working with Dr. Jeannie Annan, an amazing researcher and thinker.
    • Washington, D.C.’s city policy lab is looking for a data scientist (MA level preferred)
    • The fantastic evidence-based NGO Young1ove is looking for an RA (BA or MA level) and a postdoc (joint w/Oxford).
  • Access to cheap HIV drugs may have been responsible for up to a third of sub-Saharan Africa’s economic growth miracle (older ungated version with slightly different numbers). ht/ Lee Crawfurd.