Chris Blattman

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IPA’s weekly links

MuseveniRoadside

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

  • A very interesting job for someone with experience: IPA’s looking to hire an experienced project coordinator in Liberia to oversee the evaluation of sub-Saharan Africa’s first large-scale education public-private partnership. It’s an idea that has attracted some attention.
    • Details: master’s and 3-5 yrs experience, full description here.  Starts soon, applicants can also email Arja Dayal & Osman Siddiqi – adayal & osiddiqi at the poverty-action.org domain).
  • I was going to summarize the Roland Fryer shootings paper/NYTimes back and forth, but Berk Ozler did a better job. Vox has a thoughtful piece on why to be careful on how the news reports initially on counterintuitive findings. I’ll just add I think there’s a cultural difference between how reporters and researchers read a paper. A field comes to consensus over time and many data sets, but journalists have to pop in and out of many fields and quickly become expert enough to write about it, often with limited exposure to the larger body of research. I think reporters read “the data shows,” assuming this is a stable meaningful finding, while a researcher reads “this data shows,” understanding the limits of any one data set. Reporters don’t usually have the luxury of waiting 3 years for a final verdict. (And no, nobody reads “these data show.”)
  • Eugene Fama and Richard Thaler argue about whether markets are efficient (h/t Jason Zweig).
  • A really natural experiment (via David McKenzie):

In our experiment, a third of the houses in a town were covered by lava. People living in these houses where much more likely to move away permanently. For those younger than 25 years old who were induced to move, the “lava shock” dramatically raised lifetime earnings and education. Yet, the benefits of moving were very unequally distributed within the family: Those older than 25 (the parents) were made slightly worse off by the shock.

If anybody wants to collect baseline data for a replication, there may be an opportunity in the Japanese town built inside a volcano.

  • Ugandan President Museveni pulled his motorcade over on the way to an event and sat on a folding chair to make a half hour phone call. When the photos came out Ugandan twitter had a blast with the new #M7Challenge. (h/t Katherine Hoffmann)

 

MuseveniRoadside

https://twitter.com/JoyDoreenBiira/status/753217902699016192

 

https://twitter.com/Corleone250/status/752951839264542724

https://twitter.com/RosebellK/status/752953129235255296

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