Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

• Worm Wars update:
  • Michael Clemens and Justin Sandefur have the best explainer so far.
  • Esther Duflo and Dean Karlan (for J-PAL and IPA) summarize what the debate means for open science, and would like an independent researcher to re-appraise the data.
  • Which will be easier now that the authors of the re-analysis have posted their work online.
  • And walking public good David Evans has collected everything about the debate here.
• A study in PLOS ONE finds when the government started requiring pre-analysis plans for studies on cardiovascular drugs, success rate went from 57% to 8%. (h/t Sandefur/Lanthorn)
• And The Berkeley Initiative for Transparency In the Social Sciences has a prize for reproducible/open social science research (with a good blog post here).
• NPR has the story of an MIT student who learned in class about Dupas’ RCT showing that informing teen girls of HIV risk with older “sugar daddies” reduces rates of teen pregnancies, and started a non-profit in Botswana to do just that.
  

  “Out of hundreds of studies, here was one of the few that had that big an impact,” says Angrist, “and it sat year after year after year accumulating dust on the library shelf.”

  “I thought, ‘This is my chance to turn research into action.’ “

Cash transfers also lower rates of teen pregnancy, but there are some statistics you can’t argue with. (h/t Max Roser)