chrisblattman.com

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action • A wonderful back and forth between David Evans and DFID Deputy Chief Economist Nick Lea, ostensibly about regressions, but to me resonated more broadly on methods. Papers seem to have to need the magical pixie dust of a regression to get accepted for publication, but is it the case that every problem in development is a nail waiting for a regression hammer? Lea wonders if methods are constraining the kinds of questions economists ask

It’s ostensibly on what can we expect to learn from financial inclusion research, but really about systematic reviews and meta-analyses in general, and how we’re limited by the scope of very specific studies, and lack of standardized reporting. Studies are often limited in scope to begin with (for instance, analyzing effects of a financial product on individual users, but not spillovers on the economy as a whole), then once you start reducing and reducing to just what’s common among studies AND reported in a way that’s comparable, you’ve limited the scope of what can be concluded. Grantees who got $400 increased their earnings for a number of years (compared to a control group which didn’t), but by 9 years out, the control group had caught up and had similar earnings. Micaela Sviatschi, Anne Karing, and Thomas Fujiwara are hiring 3 RAs at Princeton • Managing Director for Teaching at the Right Level, a multi-organization collaboration (including J-PAL, IPA, Pratham, Young1ove and others), aiming to help scale a proven education program to reach three million students in several African countries over the next five years.

David Evans, ensconced in his new digs at the Center for Global Development, brings us a roundup of over 275 papers from the Center for the Study of African Economies (CSAE) conference, in a fancy new expandable format indexed by topic. Psych PhD student Mike Morrison thought about how to redesign conference posters changing the starting point from mini-article on a wall, and using usability psychology to find a design that makes it easy for passersby to quickly get the message and decide if they want to stop and learn more. Here it is: Punchline in plain English in the middle in big type, supporting tables on the right, basics of the study (original poster content), bullet pointed on the left, with a QR code (just a link shortener that you can google to easily make). It’s been a while since we had a podcast roundup, some great ones from the last few months I’ve stumbled across: • Planet Money did a great 3 parter (I know, sounds like a commitment, but it’s good), on anti-trust law –

Well, when a team compared the actually published studies in a number of top medical journals to the pre-registered hypotheses, they found 25% of the studies had switched outcomes – reporting different ones than they’d originally identified (outcome switching might mean reporting quality of life instead of overall survival, for example, even if survival had been the original goal). When the research team wrote to the journals (like JAMA, BMJ, and NEJM) fewer than half their letters were published, suggesting that top journals aren’t adhering to their own guidelines, but also that there’s no mechanism for checking and enforcing the guidelines. The University of California, Berkeley is ending their contract with Elsevier journals after negotiations (co-chaired by chief librarian, informational science professor, and MIT-trained economist Jeff MacKie-Mason), failed to find an agreement on pricing for journals and also making publications open-access. A new group of prominent economists has formed the network Economists for Inclusive Prosperity, publishing a set of concrete, research-based policy suggestions for addressing problems of wealthy economies, such as financial system stability, taxation, labor markets in the age of AI and automation, and the like.