Tag Archives: academia

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...

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...

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...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Detecting soldiers registering as new voters in Cambodia from the gender distribution. Take a few minutes to read the latest newsletter from the CSWEP, the AEA’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. In particular, the opening harrowing account from economist and law professor Jennifer Bennett Shinall on being sexually assaulted by a more senior colleague on an airplane, and on page 5, the anonymous...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Markus Goldstein reports on a study from India which finds that paying respondents for their time participating might change their responses. There’s a bipartisan bill to create a new U.S. overseas development finance agency. It would combine several private sector-focused functions that currently exist across different agencies, offer higher spending caps, and would be allowed to make equity investments. There’s a long and...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. IPA is offering funding for research on ideas about “Peace and Recovery” very broadly defined – looking to test new ideas for counteracting violence (including state and electoral), helping refugees, recovery from humanitarian crises, or countering extremism, and is accepting proposals from Ph.D. students. (The photo above is from research in a Colombian FARC demobilization camp). Expressions of Interest are due NEXT FRIDAY...

Guest Post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Above, Tim Harfords postcard rules for reading statistics (gated), inspired by Harold Pollack’s personal finance rules index card. ER docs seem to use mental heuristics – patients are more likely to get tested for and diagnosed with a heart attack if they go right after their 40th birthday than right before (job market paper from Stephen Coussens). Dick Thaler’s Nobel Prize-winning Mental Accounting paper was originally rejected...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Two Ebola survivors are suing the government of Sierra Leone in international court to discover what happened to missing millions of dollars meant to compensate and support survivors like them. Many had their clothes burned in the effort to fight the spread of the disease, and survivors were promised a support package that often failed to materialize. More than 30 percent of the resources donated to the government were...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Two Ebola survivors are suing the government of Sierra Leone in international court to discover what happened to missing millions of dollars meant to compensate and support survivors like them. Many had their clothes burned in the effort to fight the spread of the disease, and survivors were promised a support package that often failed to materialize. More than 30 percent of the resources donated to the government were...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Two Ebola survivors are suing the government of Sierra Leone in international court to discover what happened to missing millions of dollars meant to compensate and support survivors like them. Many had their clothes burned in the effort to fight the spread of the disease, and survivors were promised a support package that often failed to materialize. More than 30 percent of the resources donated to the government were...