Tag Archives: development

(From the video at the end of the post)Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Oxfam releases a report around the same time as Davos every year on who owns what portion of global wealth. Their spin on it is designed to make headlines, but Dylan Matthews explains why it’s really hard to measure.Also in Vox, Stephanie Wykstra provides a nice plain-language summary of what the research says about microloans. A very cool very cross randomized experiment (more than 50...

Thanksgiving edition, by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Image via FlickrTo make your cooking or holiday travel go a little faster IPA has our 2018 Great Holiday Travel Podcast Playlist up!Also if you’re killing time, read the abstracts from Jennifer Doleac’s thread of job market papers from women job candidates. I’m just going to drop you into the long thread here, at this dramatic paper from Jagori Saha showing how social protection programs in times of drought can save...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. At IPA even our water spills our normally distributed (or Halloween-themed, depending on your perspective)David McKenzie has updated an amazing list of all of the Development Impact Blog’s methodology posts, categorized by topic.A reminder for the academic interview fly-out season that I’ve seen a few people mention: don’t assume grad students can afford to put travel on their credit cards and wait to be reimbursed; offer to book...

Fertility for Income around the world, from Lyman StoneA new report (if you can ignore the overblown headline) looks at the massive Millennium Villages project, promoted by economist Jeffrey Sachs. It spent a *lot* in Ghana (a budget of $27 Million from a variety of sources, including local government and communities) on economic makeovers of selected locales, but did not have an overall effect on poverty, hunger, or many of the other outcomes it set out to improve. Full report here.The...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.  A slight, shy, balding, 49-year-old when the 1980 Nobel was announced, Cronin was relieved when the university sent Larry Arbeiter to his home at 7 a.m. to help him handle the deluge of requests for press interviews. Arbeiter, a writer in the university’s press office, suggested that Cronin satisfy all the interview requests at once by holding a 10 a.m. news conference. ”Oh,” Cronin insisted, ”I can’t do it then. I’ve got a 10...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action This weekend I’m planning on reading this crazy-looking story about the Ocean’s 11 team that tricked the government of Angola into sending $500 Million to an accountant’s front office in London and how they were caught (h/t Ken Opalo)

Labor Economist Mary Daly (above) is the incoming President and CEO of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. She has a pretty unconventional background (if I remember, she dropped out of high school). You can hear her explain the whole story and how she got interested in economics on the St. Louis Fed Women in Economics podcast. (Apple).Brookings has a fellowship for researchers or NGO leaders from developing countries (particularly Francophone West Africa, Southeast Asia, and Pacific...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. Field researchers in Uganda strategize before going out to track down cash grant recipients nine years laterIt’s been a big week for cash, with two studies out on cash transfers based on data from my IPA colleagues:Craig McIntosh and Andy Zeitlin worked with IPA, USAID, Catholic Relief Services, and GiveDirectly in Rwanda to compare a standard WASH (water/sanitation/hygiene) and nutrition program to cash. You can read the...

The rest of the Jack Ryan pilot is 45 minutes of talking about clustering standard errors David McKenzie has a nice post and discussion on descriptive studies in development. In his back and forth with Lant in the comments he mentions the count of how many development econ studies in 14 journals in 2015 were RCTs (9.7%). Google introduced a data set search, which trawls for publicly available data sets, similarly to how Google Scholar works. Here they describe how it works and how to...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. This blog’s landlord, Chris Blattman, was on the Economic Rockstar podcast talking about Crime, Cocaine, Chicago Gangs, and the Colombia Mafia. (iTunes) And if you liked those projects, IPA has a job posting to work on projects like those with Chris and others in Colombia. This was fun – the Development Aid Project Jargon-ator is supposed to come up with nonsense development project titles, but so far all of mine sound pretty...