IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Halloween and statistical water spills
At IPA even our water spills our normally distributed (or Halloween-themed, depending on your perspective)
  • David McKenzie has updated an amazing list of all of the Development Impact Blog’s methodology posts, categorized by topic.
  • A reminder for the academic interview fly-out season that I’ve seen a few people mention: don’t assume grad students can afford to put travel on their credit cards and wait to be reimbursed; offer to book the travel for them (managers, same for employees).
  • In an interview with Paul Romer on government’s role in innovation, he also advocates for economists staying out of political debates (he thinks Brexit was partially a reaction to people not liking economists telling them what to do). He thinks economists should stick with calculating pros and cons of different options, and leaving the debates to politicians (I didn’t know his father was governor of Colorado). Stay for the bit at the end about Berkeley faculty.
  • Chris Barrett & John Hoddinott review the state of development economics as seen through submissions to the NEUDC conference (being held at Cornell starting tomorrow): Overall they were struck by the high quality of the papers, most papers were empirical, rather than theoretical, though wth fewer with RCTs than they expected. There were few macroeconomics topics, with little on trade. And in geographic areas of interest, Latin America, the Caribbean, North Africa, the Middle East, and Oceania were underrepresented with most of the research being done in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
  • After major sexual misconduct scandals and cover-ups came to light at Save the Children and Oxfam, DFID held a summit on stopping abuse in the aid sector, but not all think their plan to work with Interpol and set up a database of offenders gets at the heart of the problem.  And the night before the conference it was announced that Save the Children had been chosen to work on the the database project, to many people’s chagrin. @AidWorkerJesus probably had the best criticism:
  • Much has been made of applying behavioral theories to public policy and integrating so-called nudge units into government, but a new survey found of the 111 identified OECD government policy nudges, a good chunk weren’t behavioral, at least half did not work as intended, and only 18 percent were put into practice.
  • Some encouragement when life has you down: Johns Hopkins molecular biologist Carol Greider describes with good humor, how in 2009, a grant committee met and deemed her application not worthy of discussion, even though she had won the Nobel Prize two hours earlier. 

IPA’s weekly links

Fertility for Income around the world, from Lyman Stone
  • A new report (if you can ignore the overblown headline) looks at the massive Millennium Villages project, promoted by economist Jeffrey Sachs. It spent a *lot* in Ghana (a budget of $27 Million from a variety of sources, including local government and communities) on economic makeovers of selected locales, but did not have an overall effect on poverty, hunger, or many of the other outcomes it set out to improve. Full report here.
  • The image above comes from Lyman Stone, showing that Africa does not have particularly high fertility when you take income into account. Or as he explains, fertility isn’t the problem, poverty is the problem.
  • A new Vox section, Future Perfect, focuses on solutions to social problems, and also has a podcast (of course).
    • You’ve probably seen excitement in recent years over the idea of just giving poor cash, but it’s important to remember cash alone helps in some ways but isn’t a panacea. This article looks at work by my IPA colleagues and others starting to compare cash alone to a 6-pronged approach called the “Graduation Model” for the world’s poorest, living on less than $1.90 a day.
  • Baird, McKenzie, and Ozler write in VoxDev about why the classic econ 101 trade-off between leisure and labor (as people get more money they should work less) doesn’t seem to apply when it comes to cash transfers to the poor.
  • Federal judges who participated in a right-leaning economics training subsequently used more economics language and ruled more conservatively (against environmental and labor regulations, and harsher criminal sentences), so professors, wield your powers wisely. (Boing Boing article summarizing it)
  • It sounds like Kanye West’s meeting with Ugandan Perpetual President Museveni was even weirder than you’d expect. 
  • And, a nice op-ed (with some help from a journalist) from the eight-year-old Swedish girl who found the 1,500-year-old sword in the lake some time ago, as her father was rushing her so he could watch the World Cup finals:

I was yelling, “I found a sword, I found a sword!” Daddy went to show it to our neighbours, whose family has lived in the village for more than 100 years, and they said it looked like a Viking sword. Daddy didn’t get to watch the football in the end.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. 

A slight, shy, balding, 49-year-old when the 1980 Nobel was announced, Cronin was relieved when the university sent Larry Arbeiter to his home at 7 a.m. to help him handle the deluge of requests for press interviews. Arbeiter, a writer in the university’s press office, suggested that Cronin satisfy all the interview requests at once by holding a 10 a.m. news conference.
”Oh,” Cronin insisted, ”I can’t do it then. I’ve got a 10 o’clock class this morning.”
With a good reporter’s instinct, Arbeiter asked what course Cronin was teaching, thinking of news photos of the newly minted Nobelist lecturing to his awed and adoring students.
”No, no,” Cronin told Arbeiter, ”I’m not teaching a course, I’m taking Chandrasekhar’s graduate course on the theory of relativity.”

  • A few days after the Nobel, Romer spoke to NYU graduate students, according to Emma van Inwegen, he spent about half the time talking to them about his research: 
  • Every year the World Bank releases its World Development Report, taking stock of one aspect of development, diving into what we know, and looking to what might be ahead. This year’s is out and the theme is The Changing Nature of Work. If wealthy countries have already transitioned to digital economies, what does that mean for countries with large populations of farmers and unemployed, and that are still working on building industrial sectors? 
  • The National Academies has just put out their comprehensive review and update on the science of learning: How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures. (The II refers to an update of the first in 1999). Note that it’s free to read online or download a PDF.
  • The popular photo & personal storytelling project Humans of New York (Facebook, & Instagram) has been in Nigeria and Ghana profiling people’s stories. One that jumped out at me was Ghanaian Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang. He got a Ph.D. in West Virginia, but afterwards faced with the decision to stay in the U.S. where job prospects were better or return to Ghana, he decided to go back so that his child wouldn’t have to grow up experiencing the racism he saw here (though he jumped in to add that he enjoyed living in both places).
  • A reminder for profs that first generation college students might not realize they can ask for help in extenuating circumstances, like extensions on work. It’s helpful to explicitly say it.
  • And on the grad level Shelly Lundberg explains that grad students from minority backgrounds or untraditional paths might not realize the unspoken things about grad school that one needs to know (like how to choose an advisor), and what do to about it. She makes some helpful recommendations about how faculty and fellow students can make sure everybody’s successful. 
  • My vague impression is that the health community has done a better job responding to more recent outbreaks of Ebola, but now it’s appeared in a conflict zone in the DRC, and traditional public health approaches of contact tracing and using the new vaccine to immunize contacts of the infected, are much more difficult to accomplish in those circumstances.
  • Previews of AER: Insights are up, including lots of names you’ll recognize, including Karlan, Mullainathan, and Roth who look at debt traps in India and the Philippines. Part of being poor is being stuck in cycles of debt, but if their high-interest debts are paid off for them, does eliminating that drag help them stay debt-free? Unfortunately, most were back in debt in six weeks, and one to two years later, those who’d had their debt paid off were borrowing at the same rates as those in a comparison group who hadn’t had any intervention.
  • Karthik Muralidharan and Paul Niehaus have a nice audio interview with VoxDev about their Experimentation at Scale paper and the differences between a typically relatively small RCT and effects when talking about big (say, national level), changes.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • I’ve been really enjoying the Vox and IRC collaboration podcast Displaced (Apple). Some highlights for me were Rachel Glennerster (who had an amazing response to the Guardian op-ed on RCTs), Alix Zwane, Owen Barder, and Stefan Dercon. I think I pinpointed one reason it feels so informative – the hosts have clearly read up on the topic, and the way they ask questions gives you all the background you need to get right into a really interesting discussion.
  • More on the econ job market: The #EconLife panel happened, here are some selected twitter moments
  • The Liberian government has approved an extension of the partnership school initiative (privately operated public schools), that was RCTed, but educators are in a waiting game to see who will fund it.
  • A new paper in the Journal of Finance finds an amazing coincidence: in 2009-2010 while the House Financial Services Committee was considering banking reform, banks delayed home foreclosures in their districts, by on average 6 months, even though there were no differences in delinquencies in those districts. The authors calculate the cost to the banks of these delays was much greater than banks’ campaign contributions to the committee members.
  • It’s been 10 years since the book Nudge. Behavioral Scientist has interviews with Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Thaler mentions the dark side of nudge principles: 

I worry a lot about what I have called “sludge,” which is nudging for evil or just making things harder. When I sign books “nudge for good,” it is meant as a plea, not an expectation. Bernie Madoff was an expert at nudging, as were all great con men. In my nightmares there are behavioral science units whose assignment is to figure out new ways to fleece customers, employees, and competitors.

  • Just a guiding principle of behavioral econ is if you want people to do something, make it easy (nudge), the flip side is that if you don’t want people to do something, you can make it hard (sludge). CVS for example, makes it very easy to opt-in to receiving text messages (hit next on the checkout screen), but very hard to opt-out (you have to print out a receipt with a phone number to call and opt-out) .
  • Now Arkansas has been removing people from Medicaid using work requirement rules (which will save the state an estimated $30 Million). Among the ways this is being done – the website where users report their required work or volunteering hours is closed for 10 hours every night for maintenance:
  • From earlier this month, J-PAL checks in with Dean Karlan, Ted Miguel, and Andrew Foster on how JDE‘s new pre-results review pilot is going.

IPA’s weekly links

  • Labor Economist Mary Daly (above) is the incoming President and CEO of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. She has a pretty unconventional background (if I remember, she dropped out of high school). You can hear her explain the whole story and how she got interested in economics on the St. Louis Fed Women in Economics podcast. (Apple).
  • Brookings has a fellowship for researchers or NGO leaders from developing countries (particularly Francophone West Africa, Southeast Asia, and Pacific Islands), interested in girls’ education. If you come with data they’ll offer additional training in how to analyze it. Deadline OCTOBER 1, and please share with interested colleagues.
  • JOB: The University of Chicago Booth Center for Decision Research (home to Richard Thaler and many top researchers) is looking for a communications person. If you can talk to people about research, you’re already ahead of most social scientists.
  • It’s job market time, advice from John Cawley, twitter chat on Sept 25th (use #EconLife hashtag). and advice on how men’s suits work (h/t Pam Jakiela). 
    • And for the aspiring RAs the @econ_RA twitter account will share RA job postings, courtesy of UCSB grad student (and job market candidate!) Sarah Bana.
    • You can also see IPA, J-PAL, and a few other orgs’ RA and other job postings at our shared jobs portal.
  • The AEA discussion boards for sharing job postings, advice, and asking and answering general professional advice are open!
  • Via Lee Crawfurd, UNICEF and UNESCO’s statistics offices seem to be fighting over who gets to announce statistics on numbers of children out of school. According to the post at least, with UNESCO set to  release updated formal figures, UNICEF leapfrogged them and released their own figures based on an updated calculation from last year’s data.
  • You may remember the kerfuffle (w/response) about 3ie’s review of the evidence on community-driven development (allowing communities to decide how aid money is spent) concluding that it didn’t empower marginalized groups. Rachel Glennerster explains her new paper, with Katherine Casey, Ted Miguel, and Maarten Voors, from Sierra Leone, which finds something similar. Although the aid money part is helpful, the communal decision process doesn’t seem to change power structures.
  • When a prominent Yale medical school professor who held an endowed chairmanship was found guilty of sexual harassment, the family his chair had been named for requested it be removed from him. So Yale gave him to a new one. (UPDATE: after an uproar, a lot of bad PR, and a letter signed by 1,000 students, faculty, and alumni, an hour ago the Dean apologized and removed that one as well).
  • Here’s a p-hacking simulator demo you can run with your students (FiveThirtyEight’s is a little prettier but with fewer parameters).
  • An Estonian boda boda ride hailing app, Taxify, is giving Uber a run for its money in six African countries.
  • Noah Smith talks about economics’ replication crisis, and Garrett Christensen & Ted Miguel review the state of the field and what to do about it

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

Field staff in Uganda
Field researchers in Uganda strategize before going out to track down cash grant recipients nine years later
  • It’s been a big week for cash, with two studies out on cash transfers based on data from my IPA colleagues:
    • Craig McIntosh and Andy Zeitlin worked with IPA, USAID, Catholic Relief Services, and GiveDirectly in Rwanda to compare a standard WASH (water/sanitation/hygiene) and nutrition program to cash. You can read the summary, brief, or full paper from IPA, or very good article from Dylan Matthews at Vox, or blog post (with link to longer brief) from Sarah Rose and Amanda Glassman at CGD. 
  • The upshot is that they RCTed both the program and two levels of cash, one calibrated to be of similar cost to the nutrition program (with about $117 going to the participants), and another much larger cash transfer (about $532 – for comparison the average yearly income is about $700 in Rwanda). Neither the nutrition program nor the small cash transfer had many effects, but the large cash transfer did help on several outcomes. Some might read this as “cash wins,” but an equally valid take would be that bigger investments work better than smaller ones: The smaller cash amount, equivalent to the WASH program, didn’t have many effects on health outcomes either.   
  • Cyrus Samii points to a this paragraph as a real key in thinking about the contribution of the cash comparison idea:

This points to an inherently different way of thinking about cash-transfer programs as a ‘benchmark’. While transfer programs maximize scope for choice and therefore provide an important window on beneficiary priorities, a comparison to other more targeted programs will inevitably require policymakers to explicitly make tradeoffs across outcome dimensions, across beneficiary populations, and between large benefits for concentrated subgroups or small benefits that are diffuse over a broader target population. By contrast with the index fund analogy, part of the value of cash transfer programs as a benchmark is that they may require donors to be explicit about their preferences, and to justify interventions that constrain beneficiary choices.

  • Also, see this interesting follow-up discussion between Andy Zeitlin and Tavneet Suri on benchmarking comparisons (somewhat technical).
  • And Craig and Andy just posted a piece themselves explaining their thinking and interpretation of the study on the Development Impact Blog
  • The other study , with Chris Blattman, Nathan Fiala, and Sebastian Martinez, looked at a ~$400 per person grant (ostensibly to get a career off the ground) in Uganda. This isn’t the first look at the program, in fact it’s the third check-in, nine years after the money was handed out. 
    • First, I can’t stress enough how hard the field staff in Uganda (including the folks above) worked to do the detective work tracking down the people nine years after the program and convince them to sit for several-hour interviews about their lives, families, and livelihoods. 
    • Findings-wise, the cash recipients had been doing better economically than a comparison group, both two and four years after the first transfer. But by year nine, that control group who didn’t get anything had caught up and were doing pretty much just as well. This might want to help us reconsider how we think about programs that offer a theoretical boost “out of poverty” and whether it really changes how things would have been otherwise. (Not that four plus years of increased earnings from a one-time grant isn’t a good outcome for a program.)
    • Nice thoughts from Berk on the implications, and another good article again from Dylan Matthews. There Berk makes a good point that I think often gets lost in general “cash” discussions. Cash isn’t one intervention, it’s a category of interventions that can do many different things, and there are an infinite number of variations (who in the household gets it, how much, all at once or spread out over time, conditional on them doing something or free, if over time do they know how long it’s guaranteed for?), which we should expect to do different things. As Berk also points out at the end of the Vox piece:

“We’re not arguing ‘cash good versus cash not good.’ Cash is good!” he said. “But the only way to give it isn’t, ‘I’ll drop 1,000 bucks on you and go away.’”

IPA’s weekly links

The rest of the Jack Ryan pilot is 45 minutes of talking about clustering standard errors

  • David McKenzie has a nice post and discussion on descriptive studies in development. In his back and forth with Lant in the comments he mentions the count of how many development econ studies in 14 journals in 2015 were RCTs (9.7%). 
  • Google introduced a data set search, which trawls for publicly available data sets, similarly to how Google Scholar works. Here they describe how it works and how to describe your data set to get it found.
  • A UK inquiry into the aid sector found it rife with sexual abuse of beneficiaries and sexual harassment within organizations, both of which were largely ignored by the organizations themselves. The “boys club” culture of organizations meant women were often afraid to report abusive behavior, and whistleblowers who did were often punished.
  • A short lesson on the Battle of Adwa, where Ethiopia repelled Italy’s attempts at colonization.
  • Sociologists often research the same topics as economists (I’d argue often with more illuminating methods and frameworks), but don’t seem to be as influential in policy debates. Justin Fox speculates on why. 
  • India dropped the law against homosexual sex which dated from colonial times. Here are the stories of some of the activists who fought against the law.
  • Yale explains the new Y-RISE initiative, which aims to systematically understand how effective programs can be scaled, with networks focused on different lines of inquiry (such as political economy, spillovers & generalizability) led by a number of great researchers.
  • With semesters starting, don’t be this professor (but do browse the supportive replies to have your faith restored):  
  • Sepak Takraw, Southeast Asian kick volleyball, involves players doing backflips and spinning kicks to get their feet above the net and spike it downward. Compilation reel here (but don’t need the sound to appreciate it).

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • This blog’s landlord, Chris Blattman, was on the Economic Rockstar podcast talking about Crime, Cocaine, Chicago Gangs, and the Colombia Mafia. (iTunes)
    • And if you liked those projects, IPA has a job posting to work on projects like those with Chris and others in Colombia.
  • This was fun – the Development Aid Project Jargon-ator is supposed to come up with nonsense development project titles, but so far all of mine sound pretty realistic.
  • With the rising popularity and global prices of quinoa, sometimes people worry that consumers in Peru, where it is traditionally produced, will be hurt. Or as one of my favorite pieces of development writing said, “Strong Demand for Things Poor People Sell Somehow Bad for Poor People.” Now Bellemare, Fajardo-Gonzalez, & Gitter are here to reassure the good residents of the West Coast that quinoa is indeed safe to consume. They find that Peruvians have other foods also, and increased prices are not strongly associated with worse household welfare in quinoa-consuming regions.
  • A Nigerian group of girls won a global tech contest with an app for confirming drugs are real (through a barcode scanner that connects to a pharmaceutical database).
  • Sociologists ask a lot of similar, or more compelling, policy questions as economists, but have a lower public profile, perhaps in part because they don’t make the research as accessible to journalists or the public.
  • Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham’s conclusions and suggestions after reading 44 job market papers
  • An interview with Card & Krueger (from a couple years ago) on the history of causal identification in economics and more recent developments (via Eric Chyn, part of a longer discussion on the history of causality in research).
  • If you’re going to be traveling (or if you just like books), check out David Evans’ blog book review category for a nice mix of fun and scholarly book recommendations to make your travel go faster.
  • Next time you find yourself cursing power outages, remember the story (h/t Emmanuel Quartey) of a massive Russian malware attack originally targeted at Ukraine that tore through computer networks around the world locking computers, deleting terabytes of data, and inflicting an estimated $10 Billion in damages. The massive shipping conglomerate Maersk was crippled – as huge container ships moved all around the world, the network tracking the ships’ contents and locations was offline, and the critical domain servers needed to restore the other computers were also all infected. Except one:

After a frantic search that entailed calling hundreds of IT admins in data centers around the world, Maersk’s desperate administrators finally found one lone surviving domain controller in a remote office—in Ghana. At some point before [the malware] NotPetya struck, a blackout had knocked the Ghanaian machine offline, and the computer remained disconnected from the network. It thus contained the singular known copy of the company’s domain controller data left untouched by the malware—all thanks to a power outage. “There were a lot of joyous whoops in the office when we found it,” a Maersk administrator says.

 

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • Snot corn! That’s crop scientist Sarah Taber’s nickname for the variety of maize native Mexicans cultivated that allowed it to grow very high in very poor soil. According to a genetic sequencing published by UC Davis researchers, the secret is in the mucus-like goop around roots that are out in the open. The bacteria in the goop allow the plant to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere, effectively fertilizing itself from the air. (Many farmers apply nitrogen fertilizer to crops, but this can have a lot of negative consequences for the environment, and be expensive or inaccessible for poor farmers). More background and explanation here. Scientists have been working on this problem for decades, but it turns out people in the mountains of southern Mexico figured it out thousands of years ago. (Also, follow Dr. Taber for a lot of interesting and funny insights into food and agriculture.)

 

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

 

  • If you can get past me at the beginning, this Planet Money episode The Poop Cartels (Apple/iTunes link), I think shows the power of good econ theory put into practice. Molly Lipscomb of the University of Virginia explains how she, with Laura Schechter, and a big research team in Senegal tried to introduce what some people have also called the “Uber for Poop.”
  • Peter Biar Ajak is a former Sudanese “lost boy” who went on to train at Harvard and Cambridge and is a research adviser for the International Growth Centre in South Sudan. He was arrested and is being held without access to a lawyer following a tweet critical of the government. Read more from Amnesty International, or follow the Free Peter Biar account.
  • On GitHub, Quartz’ guide to bad data and what to do about inconsistently formatted dates, data in PDF form, and the like.
  • Also on GitHub, the Stata cheat sheets have been updated for Stata 15.
  •  A few years ago six randomized controlled trials found introducing a new microcredit program had some positive effects, but on average did not boost people’s economic outcomes. Dahal & Fiala have a new working paper suggesting this is because of statistical power with low take-up, but they do find effects with pooled data. BUT NOT SO FAST – Rachael Meager has a paper forthcoming in AEJ: Applied using Bayesian hierarchical models and doesn’t find those clear cut average effects using pooling which allows for variation between programs and contexts. She explains here.
    • I think this approach allows for nuance that we often don’t see in methods that just count interventions and effect sizes. It makes me a little happier after the depression spiral that Eva Vivalt sent me into by pointing out how findings in dev econ are often so difficult to replicate in new contexts on the 80,000 Hours podcast. (Reading Rachael’s paper at the time probably would have been a better coping mechanism for me than stress eating.)
  • The University of Chicago’s Luigi Zingales, in Why Every Good Economist Should be a Feminist, talks about measures that departments can take to let all faculty thrive. He points to a dispute between a female junior professor at Columbia Business School and the more senior professor accused of sexually harassing her, who also held control over the joint data set that she had put a lot of time into developing. In addition to the $750,000 court judgement against him, another interesting thing to come out of it:

The Columbia Business School faculty proposed an interesting default rule to resolve these power imbalances. In case of disputes between a senior and a junior faculty, the intellectual property right of a joint project should be automatically allocated to the junior faculty, to protect the weaker contracting party. Such a rule should be adopted by all departments.

And Paul Krugman tries to teach Stephen Colbert about macroeconomics on a roller coaster:

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • My colleague Rebecca Rouse guest edits today’s faiV newsletter from NYU’s Financial Access Initiative (you can subscribe for a weekly dose of financial inclusion news).
  • Spectacular job opportunity from the International Rescue Committee working with NYU and Sesame Workshop, leading M&E on their MacArthur $100 Million-winning project to help war-affected kids.
  • Alaka Holla picks up the question of whether we should give up on baselines and use the money for bigger endlines.
  • The U.S. Census Bureau compared what husbands and wives told them each earned to tax records, and found  “When a wife earns more, both husbands and wives exaggerate the husband’s earnings and diminish the wife’s.“
  • The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah had a thoughtful public discussion with the French Ambassador Gérard Araud about what it means to different ears when calling the African immigrant or children of immigrant players on France’s World Cup team “African” or “French,” and whether those identities are in conflict (in France, does referencing African heritage make the players sound not legitimately French?). Here’s Noah’s video, and you can see some of Auraud’s responses to that if you scroll back a few days on his twitter feed (make sure you’re checking ‘tweets and replies’.)
    • It’s really worth reading Belgian player Romelu Lukaku tell his story of growing up poor to play in the World Cup:

When things were going well, I was reading newspapers articles and they were calling me Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker.

When things weren’t going well, they were calling me Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker of Congolese descent.

 

 

And 15 years ago, a friend tried the old trick of leaving $20 in the bound copy of his dissertation at the University of Chicago library to see if anybody would ever read it. After  mentioning it on twitter, one of the library staffers went to check on it:

https://twitter.com/UChicagoReg/status/1016743093503217666

 

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • Petronia (above), an online course and game from the National Resource Governance Institute, lets users run a fictional country where oil is discovered to see if they can avoid the resource curse. (h/t David Batcheck)
  • From the Stata journal– A new command, baselinetable, creates handy summary stats tables for your baseline reports to make sharing your findings much easier. It exports to Stata, Excel, CSV, etc to make it really easy to create better tables for your reports. In Stata use: net describe st0524, from(http://www.stata-journal.com/software/sj18-2)
  • Summer podcast listening:
    • I listen to a lot of podcasts, and Rough Translation (Apple) from NPR is one of my perennial favorites*. They look at how a question we deal with in the U.S. is playing out elsewhere in a fantastic RadioLab/Planet Money style that really brings you there. This season includes how a sexist Argentinian talk show suddenly turned feminist, trying to improve Ghana’s preschools, and how apologies translate across cultures and the self-described housewife who brokered an international one.
    • Displaced (Apple) from Vox and the International Rescue Committee is really good, about different aspects of international migration. The hosts and guests are both very knowledgeable and it’s very well-produced. Each episode is a master class in the subject.
    • The Freakonomics conversation with Richard Thaler reflecting back on his career and a offering peek into the Nobel award experience was fun, and it was nice to listen to old friends sharing a laugh.
    • For the more insider talk on econ, the Neolib podcast (Apple) Noah Smith and Rachael Meager episodes were interesting.
  • Having come to economics from other fields, I think econ has a massive blind spot in measurement. Note that when you say “measurement,” most economists will immediately start clustering standard errors in their heads. But on the World Bank Data Blog, Matthew Lokshin asks about the underlying data quality. When we fiddle with the stats, what if we’re watering the garden while the house is on fire? He shows how in one survey, answers changed as the survey went on, perhaps as surveyors figured out which questions would send them into loops of follow-up questions. There are so many ways for the questions you ask and the way the survey is carried out to change the data, why don’t more people pay attention to the data collection process?  Or, as Thomas de Hoop responded, “There seems to be a too strong belief that measurement error is almost always random.”
  • Measuring women’s empowerment can be really difficult (especially if you want to cross contexts or be comparable to previous studies). J-PAL has a new Practical Guide to Measuring Women’s and Girls’ Empowerment in Impact Evaluations.
  • If you missed the bizarre story about the U.S. threatening other countries about breastfeeding guidelines, here it is.  More background: Anttila-Hughes, Fernald, Gertler, Krause, & Wydick estimate 66,000 infant deaths in 1981 alone from the promotion of formula feeding in low- and middle-income countries where the water is dangerous for babies. But the conversation that followed seemed to conflate policy on breast vs. formula feeding everywhere. My understanding of the research is that it’s the water that’s the dangerous part, and there aren’t massive health benefits to the children in wealthy countries (but check with Emily Oster’s forthcoming book).
  • From last year, but worth a look: Michael Clemens looked at data from all of the nearly 180,000 apprehended unaccompanied children apprehended coming into the U.S. from  2011-2016 from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. He then tried to estimate the relative contribution of poverty vs. violence in their home regions to the migration. He estimates both play a roughly similar role, but also that even short-term increases at home lead to long-term sustained departures. One amazing note:

…the number of 17 year-old migrants apprehended during this period was over 8% of all 17 year-olds in the region at the beginning of the period.

  • And a Polish environmental charity got a big phone bill, thanks to a a stork that was being tracked with a GPS tracker. The tracker was last located in Sudan, but someone found it, took out the SIM card and racked up $2,700 worth of phone calls.

[* Disclosure, I played a very small part in the early development of the show, but that doesn’t change my recommendation for it]

 

 

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • A nicely designed and helpful media guide for researchers on how to prepare for interviews with journalists, based on a survey of science writers. It’s divided into before, during, and after the interview and gives concrete advice about what to expect and do in each.
  • Having two women on a board of directors appears to be the new having one woman on a board of directors. With “tokenism” becoming more obvious, Chang, Milkman, Chugh, and Akinola report a surprising number of S&P 1500 boards of directors with exactly two women, or “twokenism,” as they call it.
  • David’s great links (as always) this week include a few things I was going to mention, so I’ll just refer you to him. Just one addition – Chris’ thread from March, arguing the real purpose of community driven development was to disburse money without the difficulties and risks of of going through local governments.
  • A very interesting post from Evidence Action, about the failure to replicate a promising intervention that had been RCTed in Kenya years ago. The problem addressed “Sugar Daddies” – adolescent girls in relationships with older men who often pay the girls’ school fees or other expenses, but were also much more likely to have HIV than adolescent boys. The intervention was a simple program that educated girls about HIV rates and seemed effective.
    • Fortunately, the new group, Young1ove, is also committed to evidence and worked to test it again in Botswana before scaling it up. One interesting way they approached it was to carefully thinking with the partners, what they would do next in different scenarios before they knew what the results were:

The partners made a critical ex ante commitment to evidence-based decision-making. Facilitated by Young 1ove, all the partners, including the Government of Botswana and the Global Innovation Fund, agreed on a ‘pre-policy plan’: a breakdown of the potential outcomes of the evaluation and what the policy responses would be for each (something akin to the ‘pre-analysis plan’ often developed by researchers). Jointly, the partners agreed that [the new program] No Sugar would not be scaled unless the evaluation results showed clear evidence of positive impact, namely a clear and statistically significant reduction in pregnancy rates, a clear indication that girls learned and retained knowledge about the HIV prevalence of different age groups, and a downward shift in the age of girls’ sexual partners. Without evidence of impact on these fronts, No Sugar would not be scaled.

Critically, we had this discussion early—well before the evaluation results were in—guaranteeing that it was sober-minded, reflective of what we believed to be the most appropriate response to ambiguous or negative results, and unclouded by genuine but unfounded enthusiasm for a program that might ‘feel right’ but not be grounded in evidence.

  • Young1ove writes about what they’re going to do next in a thoughtful post.
  • Want to help develop more thoughtful work like this? Evidence Action is hiring for a Senior Finance and Operations Manager (DC-based).
  • This week, UNICEF, the IRC, and Campbell Collaboration released a “Mega Map” of evidence in child development research. The map isn’t of studies/evidence but of systematic reviews of evidence in child welfare, so you can find all the reviews in one place. It’s organized by variables and outcomes, and you can play with the filters and layout options in the settings, and hover over cells to see the count and quality of reviews.
  • The CEO of PayPal tried managing his daily life without a bank account, paying bills at check cashing locations, to better understand the hassles and transaction costs, and made his staff to the same.
  • How McKinsey Lost Its Way in South Africa.

 

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

“Back in school we used to call it chew and pour,” he says. Meaning, for each possible question, the teacher gives you one correct answer to memorize — or “chew” — so that come test time, you can regurgitate it — “pour it” back to her verbatim.

“And then,” adds Agbavor with a chuckle, “you forget about it. Nothing is retained.”

  • That’s from one of my favorite podcasts, NPR’s Rough Translation, which is hosted by their former East Africa correspondent, and is back for another season. In a great episode, they talk to UPenn education researcher Sharon Wolf about her work with some of my IPA colleagues in Ghana trying to improve preschools, and an unexpected wall they ran into from the people most invested in it (web audio & article, iTunes).
  • 3ie has updated their count of impact evaluations over time and by source. As Shayda Mae Sabet and Annette N. Brown report, there’s been a small dip in recent years:

  • Also Annette, Ben Wood, & Rui Müller report their findings trying to verify development econ findings (even when materials are required by journals). I’ll let Brian Nosek summarize:

  • But, (prompted by some of Justin Sandefur’s excellent live tweeting of the RISE education conference) Heather Lanthorn, Akib Khan, and I had a conversation on a more basic question – where do the implementation details get reported? How can a program be realistically copied or tested in another context when there’s no mechanism for saving or reporting how a program was run?
  • Jobs: Want to answer those and more practical questions on science, implementation, and scaling? Check out these jobs at a new Yale center for better understanding how to scale effective interventions (Director, and Program and Communications Manager). The initiative will be led by Mushfiq Mobarak, who has been very thoughtful about these issues on projects including the GiveWell-recommended “No Lean Season” incentives for seasonal migration program.
  • Also from RISE, David Evans describes the reaction when Karthik Muralitharan got up in front of the crowd and dropped the bas(eline). Muralitharan explains that under some conditions (particularly when working with governments and the project might never be implemented correctly anyway), it might makes more sense to put the money into good randomization and a bigger endline. He expands on it here.
  • Mayan kids have a much longer attention span than American kids which psychology researchers attribute to parenting styles that promote the child’s autonomy.

And a brief moment of appreciation for an international news headline writer (via Colin Campbell)

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

 

We show that this East-West difference is due to girls’ attitudes, confidence and competitiveness in math, and not to other confounding factors, such as the difference in economic conditions or teaching styles across the former political border. (via Lisa Cook)

  •  Jobs:
  • Richard Thaler writes about the evolution of behavioral economics in AER. (Gated, but you can watch him explain it in his Nobel lecture version and slides).  h/t Imran Rasul.
  • Elizabeth Warren has been arguing with economists over her previous academic research on the number of medical bankruptcies in the U.S. – hint: methodology for counting matters a lot to the final number you come up with.
  • The DRC count of Ebola infections is at 60, and the WHO has been preparing the neighboring countries for it, including with vaccinations.
  • The graph above comes from an interesting paper that Sara Lowes and Eduardo Montero describe in VoxDev, looking at how forced vaccination campaigns by the French military in colonial Central Africa against sleeping sickness in the 1920s through 1950s still have effects today. The vaccinations were often at gunpoint and had serious side effects. The result may have been lasting mistrust of the medical establishment – in the areas where the campaigns occurred, people today were less likely recently to accept a free blood test for anemia or HIV, or vaccinations.
    • It recalls Alsan & Wanamaker ‘s finding that in the U.S. after the revelation of the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments in 1972, African-American men (in particular the ones closer to Macon County, Alabama, where the experiments happened) became less likely to visit doctors. They estimate this caused an up to 1.4 year drop in life expectancy for older African-American men years later.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest Post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • Alex Tabarrok summarizes the story from the new book on RCTs, Randomistas, about how TOMS shoes invited an external evaluation of their program giving away shoes and discovered it wasn’t helping recipients very much. This isn’t that unusual in development, but faced with the evidence, they agreed to be named in the paper and be public about it, and tried to figure out how to use the insights to do better. (See study author Bruce Wydick’s thoughts on it from 2015 as well)
  • The Gates Foundation announced a new $68 million effort to improve education in India and sub-Saharan Africa. At a recent event Bill Gates said “Amazingly, we thought education would be easy, and health would be hard.”
  • The World Bank’s IFC has a new report about how great Uber is for women, funded by Uber (see Justin Sandefur on this).
  • In Colombia, psychologists and neuroscientists are jumping into action around the FARC demobilization to understand how years of violence affect the brain and how to best reintegrate former fighters back into mainstream society.
  • On the 80,000 Hours podcast, Eva Vivalt discusses some hard truths she’s come to realize as the founder of AidGrade and in her own research aggregating development economics findings. Many interventions don’t work, and those that do often don’t replicate, but she doesn’t think that means we should give up. I have a friend in drug development, and it’s a running joke that every drug he’s worked on fails (only after years of work and millions of dollars spent), but he doesn’t give up on the enterprise of curing disease.
    • Vivalt suggests that the process could be helped along by a mechanism where researchers could tap the wisdom of the crowds, polling colleagues for their priors, and what programs they think would replicate. Other research has shown prediction markets among researchers can work well for predicting which studies would replicate.
  • A new working paper put out by the Philadelphia Fed finds the neighbors of lottery winners in Canada become likely to go bankrupt. The suggestion is that neighbors are trying to keep up with the Joneses, spending more on visible things like cars, and putting more money into riskier investments like stocks. (Summary in Bloomberg).
  • Researchers put out a call to talk to women academics who’d been harassed online. They assumed they’d hear from researchers working on controversial topics, but it turned out just being a woman and having an opinion was enough to get harassed.
    • I went to find one of my favorite young economists on twitter the other day to credit her, and found out she’d left twitter, which turned out to be in part b/c of these issues. Dina Pomeranz and Sue Dynarski (both awesome online role models) remind us that you don’t owe anybody uncivil your time or attention, but the rest of us also have an obligation to call out bad behavior when we see it, and the article above has some helpful tips.
  • Netflix is trying to develop more African content.

Good economists wear their dedication on their sleeves, Chris Udry wears his below his sleeve. Here’s the results of one of several experiments in Ghana to help farmers increase the amount of food they grow, in temporary tattoo form (the two bars represent inter- and intra- village variation).

 

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • Chris found this above, (from a 2016 post) anthropologist Jennifer Esperanza got annoyed at how her field’s textbooks always had exotic cover images, when anthropology is really the study of all humanity. “‘Why can’t there be images of, for example, a group of white American women eating salads, on the cover?,’ she asked.” Dori Tunstall and Julie Hill took up the challenge of putting white people on the covers of anthro textbooks:
  • Rachel Strohm writes movingly and compellingly about her experience with depression in academia. If you’re around grad students, you probably know someone who’s quietly dealing with depression or anxiety, and Rachel explains why academia seems to bring those to the forefront. Also, you probably know someone outside academia dealing with depression. Actor Wil Wheaton explains what it was like to be an adolescent celebrity trying to hide his chronic depression and anxiety, and how once in his 20’s in the middle of the night he drove to his sister’s house to sleep on her floor, the only thing that had helped when they were kids.
    • The great irony of course is that people generally don’t talk about it, so many people go through it alone.
  • After years of work expanding access to bank accounts, and discussions of particular outreach to women, a poll of 150,000 people in 144 countries shows the gender gap in bank account ownership is the same seven percentage points as it was in 2011 when the poll first started. In high-income countries the gap is minimal or zero, while in low- and middle-income countries it can be 30 percentage points.
  • How does champion reader David Evans retain the information from all the economics, fiction, history, audiobooks, and graphic novels he reads? He takes notes along the way in Evernote, copying the best insights from Amazon’s “look inside” feature, and also writes reviews on his blog to remember the main takeaways.
  • Uganda’s education minister rejected a proposed sexual education curriculum as “recruitment grounds for homosexuality and other perversions.” Her proposed replacement will focus on abstinence and faithfulness in marriage. Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer’s 7-year study of neighboring Kenya’s abstinence-focused program found it did not reduce pregnancy or STIs, though the results were a little more complex when it was combined with free school uniforms for girls (effectively reducing their cost of education).
  • Greg Rosalsky interviews Harvard’s David Laibson for an article about Econ 101 textbooks. As the field of economics has evolved in recent decades, the most popular textbooks, Samuelson, Mankiw, etc., still essentially teach a largely theoretical classical model, tacking on behavioral and other paradigm shifts as updates at the end of chapters or in callout boxes. This means that the version of econ taught, one based on elegant imaginary lands of universal information, perfectly functioning markets, and selfishness enhancing everybody’s long-run welfare doesn’t reflect how most economists think or practice today. It’s the intellectual equivalent of putting an attractive, but outdated picture on economics’ online dating profile that doesn’t show the field as it really is, which means most policymakers’ understanding of economics is largely fictional.
    • Personally though, all of my work rests on Samuelson
  • Also read this thread from Beatrice Cherrier on how Samuelson’s attitudes towards women changed over the course of his career. And Cherrier’s note on his wife, Marion Crawford Samuelson, a gifted mathematical economist who published one paper and retired after having their first child. In her obituary, Paul Samuelson described her work as foundational to the Nobel Prize he received. Be sure to follow Beatrice for more amazing stories on the history of the field.

 

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

What a great week for the field (and sorry to the many I’ve probably missed).

  • Mary Kay Gugerty and Dean Karlan have a new book NOT on RCTs, but a practical how-to for other kinds of useful data-gathering. The Goldilocks Challenge: Right-Fit Evidence For the Social Sector focuses on four basic principles for how organizations (particularly social sector ones), can collect good M&E or other kinds of data to improve their work. And a whole lot of free case studies and toolkits are online.
  • Job: IPA is starting a research methods initiative, doing research on research – using the hundreds of studies in progress across 21 countries to improve and explore new methods for the field. We’re looking for a director for the new initiative (Ph.D.-level)
  • In some states where teacher pay is particularly low, districts are bringing in teachers from the Philippines who will work for very little (and often pay middlemen high fees for the opportunity). One Arizona official explains:

“In these times, you have to be innovative and creative in recruiting,” said Patricia Davis-Tussey, Pendergast’s head of human resources. “We embrace diversity and really gain a lot from the cultural exchange experience. Our students do as well.” (Via Alex Eble)

 

  • GiveWell offered their take on recent discussions of the longer-term impacts of unconditional cash transfers today.
  • One of the recent trends we’ve seen from some studies is the long-term effects of cash transfers on the children of the families for their development later in life. And there’s a new unconditional cash transfer RCT in the U.S. of $333 monthly to poor mothers of babies for 40 months, to see if it affects the brain and other development of those babies. (h/t Jonathan Morduch)
  • And after a few years of study, the Gates Foundation is announcing a new $138 Million initiative focusing on the causes and solutions of poverty in the U.S.
  • I noted a few weeks ago the noticeable absence of African academic and policy organizations from many conversations about policy in Africa. Now the Hewlett Foundation has a call out for East and West African policy organizations promoting evidence-based policymaking.
  • And you know how awesome your conference presentation is going to be, but how do you lure people to your talk? Present in a room close to where the coffee is being served, according to David Evans’ summary of a new analysis of German Economics Association conference sessions.

IPA’s weekly links

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • Penny Goldberg of Yale will be the new World Bank Chief Economist, she and Nina Pavcnik wrote about their work on why opening up trade helped developing countries grow at VoxDev.
  • An update on last week’s discussion of GiveDirectly’s 3-year effects findings (if you need a catch-up, see Justin Sandefur’s post which is also valuable for the review of other recent research at the end). The questions focused on what we can say on whether the effects fade, and if handing a lot of money to some people in a village hurts those who didn’t get the money. Paper authors Johannes Haushofer and Jeremy Shapiro have a nice back-and-forth with Berk Ozler about it here, and Berk disagrees with some of Sandefur’s inferences. GiveDirectly also updated their take on it. In the end it seemed like a productive discussion, and it’s worth noting that GiveDirectly had already moved to giving cash to everybody in the village some time ago to avoid the possibility of these negative side-effects.
  • One more reason Dina Pomeranz is Development Econ’s Most Valuable Tweeter is that she’s always finding new ways to make the wonky lessons from the field more accessible to the public. Most recently she’s been tweetstorming her class lectures on development in very thoughtful ways (summaries of the lessons in the body of the tweet, threaded with pictures of key slides and graphs, and links to the original papers). Here’s one example.
  • A repeated theme here is that a reason to test policies is that good-sounding ideas can sometimes backfire:
    • In Florida, a lifetime ban on convicted drug traffickers receiving food stamps seems to have increased recidivism, and specifically for financial crimes. (Paper by Cody Tuttle, Forthcoming in AEJ – Economic Policy, h/t John Holbein)
    • A really good episode of the podcast Reply All looks at recent well-intentioned efforts by Congress to combat child sex trafficking by shutting down websites known for classified ads by sex workers. They talk to several people in the industry and economist Scott Cunningham, who all predict that shutting down an above-ground marketplace where sex workers can vet clients and share lists of known good and bad ones would hurt the sex workers in the end. In a follow-up, one interviewee reported among her sex worker colleagues two confirmed murders and thirteen more missing in the month following the passage of the law.
  • In a move that must be giving IRB chairs ulcers, California police apparently made an arrest in the infamous decades-old Golden State serial killer case by comparing crime scene DNA to DNA posted on genealogy sites and finding the suspect through relatives’ family trees. They then surreptitiously collected some of the suspect’s DNA for confirmation.
  • Though Anne Sofie Tegner Anker, Jennifer L. Doleac, and Rasmus Landersø found Denmark’s expanded use of DNA collection and surveillance appears to have reduced crime there (h/t Dylan Matthews).
    • It doesn’t always work out though. In Germany, law enforcement thought they’d caught a break tracking a non-serial killer across Europe. But after a 15-year chase, the DNA which kept turning up at crime scenes turned out to be from a worker at the cotton swab supplier.