development impact links
-
Skelly lays out 5 lessons from two mobile phone surveys in Mozambique. Among other takeaways, providing airtime incentives increased retention of respondents, but not by very much: from 45% up to 51%. (@ FHI360)
-
In this week’s Science, Rema Hanna, Gabriel Kreindler, and Ben Olken look what happened when Jakarta abruptly ended HOV rules – showing how traffic got worse for everyone. Nice example of using Google traffic data – MIT news has a summary and discussion of how the research took place : “The key thing we did is to start collecting traffic data immediately,” Hanna explains. “Within 48 hours of the policy announcement, we were regularly having our computers check Google Maps every 10 minutes to check current traffic speeds on several roads in Jakarta. ... By starting so quickly we were able to capture real-time traffic conditions while the HOV policy was still in effect. We then compared the changes in traffic before and after the policy change.”All told, the impact of changing the HOV policy was highly significant. After the HOV policy was abandoned, the average speed of Jakarta’s rush hour traffic declined from about 17 to 12 miles per hour in the mornings, and from about 13 to 7 miles per hour in the evenings”
-
From NPR’s Goats and Soda: 4-year kids of Cameroonian subsistence farmers take the marshmallow test, as do German kids – who do you think did best?
-
How to teach development economics in 20 minutes to 7th graders – Dave Evans explains his method.
-
The “beginning at the end” approach to experimentation – written from the point of view of business start-ups, but could easily apply to policy experiment work too “The typical approach to research is to start with a problem. In business, this often leads to identifying a lot of vague unknowns—a “broad area of ignorance” as Andreasen calls it—and leaves a loosely defined goal of simply reducing ignorance…“Beginning at the end” means that you determine what decision you’ll make when you know the results of your research, first, and let that dictate what data you need to collect and what your results need to look like in order to make that decision.”
-
An exciting new place for lots of discussion on policy issues in development economics – this week VoxDev launched. Some of the opening posts include:
-
Women in Economics at Berkeley has a great summer reading list of recent papers which look at the gender earnings gap in different ways, including short summaries of some very recently published papers in the AER, QJE, and JPE on this issue.
-
The NYTimes on how business schools are trying to teach fintech, although with no agreement on what this means or how to do it.
-
Milli Lake and Sarah Parkinson on the ethics of fieldwork preparedness – “It’s one of the discipline’s worst kept secrets that graduate students, in particular, feel practically unprepared for their fieldwork… We worry about an intellectual trend that increasingly rewards researchers for “out-dangering” one another (often with dubious scholarly gain). This doesn’t mean scholars should abandon fieldwork; it means that we should take the practical and ethical components of its planning and implementation more seriously. We can start by asking simple questions about first aid, check-ins, transport safety, and data protection”
-
The papers and proceedings issue of the AER has several papers of interest to development economists, including:
-
Esther Duflo’s lecture of “The Economist as Plumber” – “details that we as economists might consider relatively uninteresting are in fact extraordinarily important in determining the final impact of a policy or a regulation, while some of the theoretical issues we worry about most may not be that relevant”…” an economist who cares about the details of policy implementation will need to pay attention to many details and complications, some of which may appear to be far below their pay grade (e.g., the font size on posters) or far beyond their competence level (e.g., the intricacy of government budgeting in a federal system).”
-
Sandip Sukhtankar has a paper on replications in development economics, part of two sessions on replication in economics.
-
Shimeles et al. on tax auditing and tax compliance experiments in Ethiopia: “Businesses subject to threats increased their profit tax payable by 38 percent, while those that received a persuasion letter increased by 32 percent, compared to the control group.”
-
4 papers on maternal and child health in developing countries (Uganda, Kenya, India, Zambia).
-
Following up on Berk’s post on list experiments, 538 provides another example, using list experiments to identify how many Americans are atheists.
-
The Economist on how governments are using nudges – with both developed and developing country examples.
-
The equivalent to an EGOT for economists? Dave and Markus have come up with the EJAQ or REJAQ for economists who have published in all the top-4 or top-5 journals.
-
Call for papers: TCD/LSE/CEPR conference on Development economics to be held at Trinity College, Dublin on September 18-19. Imran Rasul and I are keynote speakers.
Pages
